Truman Capote quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, Truman Capote has a lot to say. In this list we present the 84 best Truman Capote quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!
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Truman Capote quotes
Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell, ‘ Holly advised him. ‘That was Doc’s mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can’t give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That’s how you’ll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You’ll end up looking at the sky.””She’s drunk, ” Joe Bell informed me. “Moderately, ” Holly confessed….Holly lifted her martini. “Let’s wish the Doc luck, too, ” she said, touching her glass against mine. “Good luck: and believe me, dearest Doc — it’s better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.
— Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who’s a friend.
— Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
He loved her, he loved her, and until he’d loved her she had never minded being alone….
— Truman Capote, Summer Crossing
Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.
— Truman Capote
Well, I’m about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy.
— Truman Capote
I’d rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Which isn’t being pious. Just practical. Cancer may cool you, but the other’s sure to.
— Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
The blame of course belonged to Clyde, who just was not much given to talk. Also, he seemed very little curious himself: Grady, alarmed sometimes by the meagerness of his inquiries and the indifference this might suggest, supplied him liberally with personal information; which isn’t to say she always told the truth, how many people in love do? or can? but at least she permitted him enough truth to account more or less accurately for all the life she had lived away from him. It was her feeling, however, that he would as soon not hear her confessions: he seemed to want her to be as elusive, as secretive as he was himself.
— Truman Capote, Summer Crossing
all his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved.
— Truman Capote
Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.
— Truman Capote
Once a thing is set to happen, all you can do is hope it won’t. Or will-depending. 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.
— Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the music the words make.
— Truman Capote, Truman Capote: Conversations
You can’t blame a writer for what the characters say.
— Truman Capote
Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.
— Truman Capote
I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
— Truman Capote
It’s a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.
— Truman Capote, Conversations with Capote
That isn’t writing at all, it’s typing.
— Truman Capote
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.
— Truman Capote
I know it’s become fashionable to depict the police as sadistic Cossacks riding down innocent citizens, but I’ve become well enough acquainted with law-enforcement agencies across the country to know that’s just not the case. Of course, a certain small percentage of policemen are irresponsible…but that doesn’t justify the current unjust barrage of propaganda against a tribe of men who are hard-working, underpaid and daily risking their lives to protect us. I’m sure there are isolated instances of police brutality, but the rising crime rate and urban violence constitute a far, far more pressing problem.
— Truman Capote
Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavour.
— Truman Capote
When he was in the army he’d picked up a great many girls: sometimes nothing happened except a lot of talk, and that was all right too: because it didn’t matter what you said to them, for in those transient moments lies or truth were arbitrary and you were whatever you wanted to be.
— Truman Capote, Summer Crossing
Imagination, of course, can open any door – turn the key and let terror walk right in.
— Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody. You can’t have too many friends because then you’re just not really friends.
— Truman Capote
Don’t wanna sleep, don’t wanna die, just wanna go a-travelin’ through the pastures of the sky.
— Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
The trouble with all these far-right and far-left mentalities is that they can encompass only one side of an argument and are congenitally incapable of holding two opinions in their heads at the same time.
— Truman Capote
So if black power means black armies racing through the streets, creating havoc, that certainly does nothing to advance the legitimate political and economic aspirations of the black community. Just the opposite, in fact….If they think a few Molotov cocktails are going to bring down the whole system and build something new, I’m afraid they’re just indulging in wishful-thinking
— Truman Capote, Truman Capote: Conversations
Yes: but aren’t love and marriage notoriously synonymous in the minds of most women? Certainly very few men get the first without promising the second: love, that is–if it’s just a matter of spreading her legs, almost any woman will do that for nothing.
— Truman Capote, Summer Crossing
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.
— Truman Capote
The only rich women who ever interested me, the ones who were ever my friends, were adventuresses—people who were total self-creations.
— Truman Capote
The average personality re-shapes frequently, every few years even our bodies undergo a complete overhaul-desirable or not, it is a natural thing that we should change.
— Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
A very fine artist can take something quite ordinary and, through sheer artistry and willpower, turn it into a work of art.
— Truman Capote
I think the argument that no whites are free of racism is quite erroneous. But then, on another level, does it really matter if anybody is free of any negative feeling about anything? No matter how much you love somebody, you know, there’s some part of him you don’t like.
— Truman Capote
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.
— Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
Somewhere in this world there exists an exceptional philosopher named Florie Rotondo.The other day I came across one of her ruminations printed in a magazine devoted to the writings of schoolchildren. It said: “If I could do anything, I would go to the middle of our planet, Earth, and seek uranium, rubies, and gold. I’d look for Unspoiled Monsters. Then I’d move to the country. –Florie Rotondo, age 8.”Florie, honey, I know just what you mean – even if you don’t: how could you, age eight?
— Truman Capote, Answered Prayers – The Unfinished Novel
All children are morbid: it’s their one saving grace.
— Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms
Strange where our passions carry us, floggingly pursue us, forcing upon us unwanted dreams, unwelcome destinies.
— Truman Capote, Music for Chameleons
If we know the past, and live the present, it is possible that we dream the future?
— Truman Capote, Summer Crossing
Fitzgerald has charm. It’s a silly word, but it’s an exact word for me. I like ‘The Great Gatsby’ and it’s sad, gay nostalgia.
— Truman Capote
Royal summoned mourners. They came from the village, from the neighboring hills and, wailing like dogs at midnight, laid siege to the house. Old women beat their heads against the walls, moaning men prostrated themselves: it was the art of sorrow, and those who best mimicked grief were much admired. After the funeral everyone went away, satisfied that they’d done a good job.
— Truman Capote, House of Flowers
Perhaps, like most of us in a foreign country, he was incapable of placing people, selecting a frame for their picture, as he would at home; therefore all Americans had to be judged in a pretty equal light, and on this basis his companions appeared to be tolerable examples of local color and national character.
— Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Some cities, like wrapped boxes under Christmas trees, conceal unexpected gifts, secret delights. Some cities will always remain wrapped boxes, containers of riddles never to be solved, nor even to be seen by vacationing visitors, or, for that matter, the most inquisitive, persistent travelers.
— Truman Capote, Music for Chameleons
Are the dead as lonesome as the living?
— Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms
The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. His works means nothing, otherwise. It has no meaning.
— Truman Capote
The walls of the cell fell away, the sky came down, I saw the big yellow bird.
— Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing.
— Truman Capote, Summer Crossing
The answer is good things only happen to you if you’re good. Good? Honest is more what I mean… Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I’d rather have cancer than a dishonest heart.
— Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
A kind of silence, if I may say, was walking through the house, and, like most silence, it was not silent at all: it rapped on the doors, echoed in the clocks, creaked on the stairs, leaned forward to peer into my face and explode.
— Truman Capote
You can’t give your heart to a wild thing.
— Truman Capote
The average personality reshapes frequently, every few years even our bodies undergo a complete overhaul – desirable or not, it is a natural thing that we should change. All right, here were two people who never would change. That is what Mildred Grossman had in common with Holly Golightly. They would never change because they’d been given their character too soon; which, like sudden riches, leads to a lack of proportion: the one had splurged herself into a top-heavy realist, the other a lopsided romantic.
— Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person’s nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.
— Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms
Kay yawned and rested her forehead against the windowpane, her fingers idly strumming the guitar: the strings sang a hollow, lulling tune, as monotonously soothing as the Southern landscape, smudged in darkness, flowing past the window. An icy winter moon rolled above the train across the night sky like a thin white wheel.
— Truman Capote, The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories
Because it’s indeed difficult to portray, in any meaningful depth, another being, his appearance, speech, mentality, without to some degree, and often for quite trifling cause, offending him. The truth seems to be the nobody likes to see himself described as he is, or cares to see exactly set down what he said and did. Well, even i can understand that – because i don’t like it myself when I am the sitter not the portraitist: the frailty of egos- and the more accurate the strokes, the greater the resentment.
— Truman Capote
Those fellows, they’re always crying over killers. Never a thought for the victims.
— Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
Duntz asked Smith, ‘Added up, how much money did you get from the Cutters?’ ‘Between forty and fifty dollars.
— Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
Of course there is a Santa Claus. It’s just that no single somebody could do all he has to do. So the Lord has spread the task among us all. That’s why everybody is Santa Claus. I am. You are.
— Truman Capote, One Christmas
But I’m not a saint yet. I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius.
— Truman Capote, Music for Chameleons
Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.
— Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
…he called after her as shedisappeared down the path, a pretty girl in a hurry…
— Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
But if Miss Golightly remained unconscious of my existence, except as a doorbell convenience, I became, through the summer, rather an authority on hers. I discovered, from observing the trash-basket outside her door, that her regular reading consisted of tabloids and travel folders and astrological charts; that she smoked an esoteric cigarette called Picayunes; survived on cottage cheese and Melba Toast; that her vari-colored hair was somewhat self-induced. The same source made it evident that she received V-letters by the bale. They were torn into strips like bookmarks. I used occasionally to pluck myself a bookmark in passing. Remember and miss you and rain and please write and damn and goddamn were the words that recurred most often on these slips; those, and lonesome and love.
— Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
I only object when any one particular group…gets a stranglehold on American criticism and squeezes out anybody who doesn’t conform to its own standards….The ax falls, ecumenically, on the head of anybody…who doesn’t share this group’s parochial preoccupations.
— Truman Capote
Before publication, and if provided by persons whose judgment you trust, yes, of course criticism helps. But after something is published, all I want to read or hear is praise.
— Truman Capote
What I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter’s evening.
— Truman Capote
What are your chief vices? And virtues? I have no vices. The concept doesn’t exist in my vocabulary. My chief virtue is gratitude
— Truman Capote
She was never without dark glasses, she was always well groomed, there was a consequential good taste in the plainness of her clothes, the blues and grays and lack of luster that made her, herself, shine so.
— Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
And in this moment, like a swift intake of breath, the rain came.
— Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms
It’s bad enough in life to do without something YOU want; but confound it, what gets my goat is not being able to give somebody something you want THEM to have.
— Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory
It snowed all week. Wheels and footsteps moved soundlessly on the street, as if the business of living continued secretly behind a pale but impenetrable curtain. In the falling quiet there was no sky or earth, only snow lifting in the wind, frosting the window glass, chilling the rooms, deadening and hushing the city. At all hours it was necessary to keep a lamp lighted, and Mrs. Miller lost track of the days: Friday was no different from Saturday and on Sunday she went to the grocery: closed, of course.
— Truman Capote, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940’s Until Now
Her bedroom window overlooked the garden, and now and then, usually when she was “having a bad spell, ” Mr. Helm had seen her stand long hours gazing into the garden, as though what she saw bewitched her. (“When I was a girl, ” she had once told a friend, “I was terribly sure trees and flowers were the same as birds or people. That they thought things, and talked among themselves. And we could hear them if we really tried. It was just a matter of emptying your head of all other sounds. Being very quiet and listening very hard. Sometimes I still believe that. But one can never get quiet enough…”)
— Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
I love New York, even though it isn’t mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.
— Truman Capote
New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water.
— Truman Capote
Very few authors, especially the unpublished, can resist an invitation to read aloud.
— Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That’s why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.
— Truman Capote
The most dangerous thing in the world is to make a friend of an Englishman because he’ll come sleep in your closet rather than spend 10 shillings on a hotel.
— Truman Capote
Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.
— Truman Capote
In California everyone goes to a therapist is a therapist or is a therapist going to a therapist.
— Truman Capote
I’ve always seen myself as a winner even as a kid. If I hadn’t I just might have gone down the drain a couple of times. I’ve got something inside of me peasantlike and stubborn and I’m in it ’til the end of the race.
— Truman Capote
That’s not writing that’s typing.
— Truman Capote
It was as if I were an oyster and somebody forced a grain of sand into my shell — a grain of sand that I didn’t know was there and didn’t particularly welcome. Then a pearl started forming around the grain and it irritated me, made me angry, tortured me sometimes. But the oyster can’t help becoming obsessed with the pearl.
— Truman Capote
I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was no egoist… he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the one beautiful comrade, the only inseparable love… poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point.
— Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms
Love, having no geography, knows no boundaries.
— Truman Capote
Love is a chain of love as nature is a chain of life.
— Truman Capote
Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.
— Truman Capote
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music that words make.
— Truman Capote
Fame is only good for one thing – they will cash your check in a small town.
— Truman Capote
When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely.
— Truman Capote
Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.
— Truman Capote
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