Truman Capote Quotes

If you have a single narrator, a person like an "I" - "'I' did this" and "'I' did that" - it automatically solves the most difficult problem in writing.

If you sweep a house, and tend its fires and fill its stove, and there is love in you all the years you are doing this, then you and that house are married, that house is yours.

I've never been a teacher in my life.

My father was quite an attractive guy. He was very intelligent and very amusing. I didn't like him. He was always very nice to me but I just didn't like him.

Clocks indeed must have their sacrifice: what is death but an offering to time and eternity?

It was the most haunting room I've ever seen. Because you know what's in it? All the left­overs, all the paraphernalia that the different condemned men had had with them in the "holding" cells.

Gasping for breath, the body still battling for life.

I knew Lee Harvey Oswald, and I knew Jack Kennedy. The odds against that-one person knowing all four of those men-must be astounding.

I'm scarcely an enfant!

I never had a rejection slip in my life.

You're wonderful. Unique. I love you.

Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pearl sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.

I feel that all a writer has is his own experience.

Norman Mailer thinks William Burroughs is a genius, which I think is ludicrous beyond words. I don't think William Burroughs has an ounce of talent.

Hulga the whole while hollering like a half-slaughtered hog. (Attention, students of literature! Alliteration - have you noticed? - is my least vice.)

Are there any writers on the literary scene whom I consider truly great? Yes: Truman Capote.

Mick Jagger moves like a parody between a majorette girl and Fred Astaire.

You don't understand. You've never hated anybody. No, I never have. We're allotted just so much time on earth, and I wouldn't want the Lord to see me wasting mine in any such manner.

I've tried to believe, but I don't, I can't, and there's no use pretending.

There is such an animal as a nonstylist, only they're not writers - they're typists.

As long as you live, there's always something waiting; and even if it's bad, and you know it's bad, what can you do? You can't stop living.

Writing in the first person automatically gives you a point of view.

I thought that Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment that I cut his throat.

Work is the only device I know of.

The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. His work means nothing, otherwise. It has no meaning.

One always likes one's latest book best. That's a natural feeling.

That's the question: is truth an illusion, or is illusion truth, or are they essentially the same? Myself, I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true.

You don't run out on people; you run out on yourself.

Ever since I was a child, folks have thought they had me pegged, because of the way I am, the way I talk. And they're always wrong.

I'd met Sharon Tate at the Cannes Film Festival.

Jay Sebring cut my hair a couple of times.

I despise people who can't control themselves.

When I'm writing, I never write more than four hours a day.

Some prisons don't allow guitar because the strings can be detached and used as weapons.

That's all a writer has to write about - what he sees and hears and what not.

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make.

He loved her, he loved her, and until he'd loved her she had never minded being alone....

If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there's no point in it. . . . for me, every act of art is the act of solving a mystery.

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavour.

Don't wanna sleep, don't wanna die, just wanna go a-travelin' through the pastures of the sky.

I have an extremely strong, masculine mind and a feminine sensibility level, which is kind of an unusual combination. Both men and women tell me things and I can relate on two levels simultaneously.

The only rich women who ever interested me, the ones who were ever my friends, were adventuresses---people who were total self-creations.

A very fine artist can take something quite ordinary and, through sheer artistry and willpower, turn it into a work of art.

But if you live your life without feeling and compassion for your fellowman—you are as an animal—'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth' & happiness & peace of mind is not attained by living thus.

All children are morbid: it's their one saving grace.

Strange where our passions carry us, floggingly pursue us, forcing upon us unwanted dreams, unwelcome destinies.

If we know the past, and live the present, it is possible that we dream the future?

The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. His works means nothing, otherwise. It has no meaning.

The walls of the cell fell away, the sky came down, I saw the big yellow bird.

Duntz asked Smith, 'Added up, how much money did you get from the Cutters?' 'Between forty and fifty dollars.