Truman Capote Quotes & Sayings

Our real fears are the sounds of footsteps walking in the corridors of our minds, and the anxieties, the phantom floatings, they create. — Truman Capote

As Miss Golightly was saying, before she was so rudely interrupted ... — Truman Capote

Even for those who dislike champagne, myself among them, there are two champagnes one can't refuse: Dom Perignon and the even superior Cristal, which is bottled in a natural-colored glass that displays its pale blaze, a chilled fire of such prickly dryness that, swallowed, seems not to have been swallowed at all, but instead to have turned to vapors on the tongue and burned there to one damp sweet ash. — Truman Capote

What happens to us on earth is lost in the endless shine of eternity. — Truman Capote

Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in. — Truman Capote

[Mrs. Clare] is a gaunt, trouser-wearing, woolen-shirted, cowboy-booted, ginger-colored, gingery-tempered woman of unrevealed age ("That's for me to know, and you to guess") but promptly revealed opinions, most of which are announced in a voice of rooster-crow altitude and penetration. — Truman Capote

Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of
chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably. — Truman Capote

Well, it wasn't no revelation to me cause I always knew she was a freak. — Truman Capote

Until Perry was five, the team of "Tex & Flo" continued to work the rodeo circuit. As a way of life, it wasn't "any gallon of ice cream," Perry once recalled: "Six of us riding in an old truck, sleeping in it, too, sometimes, living off mush and Hershey kisses and condensed milk. Hawks Brand condensed milk it was called, which is what weakened my kidneys - the sugar content - which is why I was always wetting the bed." Yet it was not an unhappy existence, especially for a little boy proud of his parents, admiring of their showmanship and courage - a happier life, certainly, than what replaced it. For Tex and Flo, both forced by ailments to retire from their occupation, settled near Reno, Nevada. — Truman Capote

A boy has to peddle his book. — Truman Capote

Oh Jesus God we did belong to each other. He was mine. — 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

It's a bore, but the answer is good things only happen to you if you're good. Good? Honest is more what I mean. Not lawtype honest
I'd rob a grave, I'd steal two-bits off a dead man's eyes if I thought it would contribute to the day's enjoyment
but unto-thyself-type honest. Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: 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

A year ago, when they first encountered each other, he'd thought Perry "a good guy," if a bit "stuck on himself," "sentimental," too much "the dreamer." He had liked him but not considered him especially worth cultivating until, one day, Perry described a murder, telling how, simply for "the hell of it," he had killed a colored man in Las Vegas - beaten him to death with a bicycle chain. — Truman Capote

Did you ever, in that wonderland wilderness of adolesence [sic] ever, quite unexpectedly, see something, a dusk sky, a wild bird, a landscape, so exquisite terror touched you at the bone? And you are afraid, terribly afraid the smallest movement, a leaf, say, turning in the wind, will shatter all? That is, I think, the way love is, or should be: one lives in beautiful terror. — Truman Capote

I knew damn well I'd never be a movie star. It's too hard; and if you're intelligent, it's too embarrassing. — Truman Capote

What I found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany's. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it;nothing very bad could happen to you there. — Truman Capote

More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones. — Truman Capote

Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity. — Truman Capote

How silly, my dear; don't you know that if I came here as a child, then most of me never left? — 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

You know those days when you get the mean reds?"
"Same as the blues?"
"No," she said slowly. "No, the blues are because you're getting fat or maybe it's been raining too long. You're sad, that's all. But the mean reds are horrible. You're afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don't know what you're afraid of ... — Truman Capote

All human life has its seasons and cycles, and no one's personal chaos can be permanent. Winter, after all, gives way to spring and summer, though sometimes when branches stay dark and the earth cracks with ice, one thinks they will never come, that spring, and that summer, but they do, and always. — 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

All human life has its seasons, and no one's personal chaos can be permanent: winter, after all, does not last forever, does it? There is summer, too, and spring, and though sometimes when branches stay dark and the earth cracks with ice, one thinks they will never come, that spring, that summer, but they do, and always. — Truman Capote

house and our'n. That old barn 'ud soak up a lotta racket 'fore it reached us. And did you ever think of this? Him that done it, he must've knowed we wouldn't hear. Else he wouldn't have took the chance - shootin' off a shotgun four times in the middle of the night! Why, he'd be crazy. Course, you might say he must be crazy anyhow. To go doing what he did. But my opinion, him that done it had it figured out to the final T. He knowed. And there's one thing I know, too. Me and the Missis, — Truman Capote

I should say a student does well to remain one as long as he can. It seems to me very doubtful that formal education could ever harm a potential artist - of course, it won't make him one either. — Truman Capote

It is well known that women outlive men; could it merely be superior vanity that keeps them going? — Truman Capote

What I do requires fantastic concentration ... but you can't be totally alone, or you lose all contact with reality, so even when I'm engrossed and secluded, Jack Dunphy can be there. He's my oldest and best friend, and best critic too. — Truman Capote

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

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

The problem with living outside the law is that you no longer have its protection. — Truman Capote

But, my dear, so few things are fulfilled: what are most lives but a series of incompleted episodes? 'We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task ... ' It is wanting to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something. — Truman Capote

Then starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat. — Truman Capote

Billy Bob, as though he were in pain, doubled up on the bed like a jackknife; but his face was suddenly clear, his grubby boy-eyes twitching like candles. She's so cute, he whispered, she's the cutest dickens I ever saw, gee, to hell with it, I don't care, I'd pick all the roses in China.
Preacher would have picked all the roses in China, too. He was as crazy about her as Billy Bob. But Miss Bobbit did not notice them. — Truman Capote

And in this moment, like a swift intake of breath, the rain came. — Truman Capote

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil. — Truman Capote

Oh, he's not my idea of the absolute finito. — Truman Capote

If you can hear time passing it makes the day last longer. I've come to appreciate a long day. — Truman Capote

Then, there on the screen I saw Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. An American Tragedy, a film I'd seen at least twice, not that it was all that great, but still it was very good, especially the final scene, which was unreeling at this particular moment: Clift and Taylor standing together, separated by the bars of a prison cell, a death cell, for Clift is only hours away from execution. Clift, already a poetic ghost inside his grey death-clothes, and Taylor, nineteen and ravishing, sublimely fresh as lilac after rain. — Truman Capote

On the opposite bank, a hummingbird, whirring it's invisible wings, ate the heart of a giant tiger lily. — Truman Capote

With an exceedingly contemptuous expression, Idabel drew up to her full height. "Son," she said, and spit between her fingers, "what you've got in your britches is no news to me, and no concern of mine: hell, I've fooled around with nobody but boys since first grade. I never think like I'm a girl; you've got to remember that, or we can't never be friends." For all its bravado, she made this declaration with a special and compelling innocence; and when she knocked one fist against the other, as, frowning, she did now, and said: "I want so much to be a boy: I would be a sailor, I would ... " the quality of her futility was touching. — Truman Capote

Most contemporary novelists, especially the American and the French, are too subjective, mesmerized by private demons; theyre enraptured by their navels and confined by a view that ends with their own toes. — Truman Capote

Everybody has to feel superior to somebody," she said. "But it's customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege. — Truman Capote

I've been other things beside a clown. I have sold insurance, too. — Truman Capote

She spent the rest of the way home despising New York: anonymity, in virtuous terror; and the squeaking drainpipe, all-night light, ceaseless footfall, subway corridor, numbered door (3C).
('Master Misery') — Truman Capote

Of course, a good meal might have helped; but I had already abolished my hunger by eating chocolate cake with fungus icing. Or I could have gone to a movie and smoked some grass. But when you're in that kind of sweat, the only lasting remedy is to ride with it: accept the anxiety, be depressed, relax, and let the current carry you where it will. — Truman Capote

I well understand why analysts demand high payment, for what can be more tedious than listening to another person recount his dreams? — Truman Capote

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor. — Truman Capote

Time rarely weighed upon him, for he had many methods of passing it. — Truman Capote

My preferred pastimes are conversation, reading, travel and writing, in that order. — Truman Capote

Good taste is the death of art — Truman Capote

I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon. — Truman Capote

Champagne does have one regular drawback: swilled as a regular thing a certain sourness settles in the tummy, and the result is permanent bad breath. Really incurable. — Truman Capote

Leave it to me: I'm always top banana in the shock department. — Truman Capote

She is pure Alice in Wonderland, and her appearance and demeanor are a nicely judged mix of the Red Queen and a Flamingo. — Truman Capote

In the eyelid-blue betweenness the wordy sounds of the whiskey-drinkers spilled distantly. — Truman Capote

But that's impossible. Can you imagine Mr. Clutter missing church? Just to sleep? — Truman Capote

Shoot, boy, the country's just fulla folks what knows everything, and don't understand nothing, just fullofem. — Truman Capote

It was ideal apple-eating weather; the whitest sunlight descended from the purest sky, and an easterly wind rustled, without ripping loose, the last of the leaves on the Chinese elms. — Truman Capote

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

I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true. — Truman Capote

It was like the time he'd failed algebra and felt so relieved, so free: failure was definite, a certainty, and there is always peace in certainties. — Truman Capote

Reading dreams. That's what started her walking down the road. Every day she'd walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day she just kept on. — Truman Capote

Never love a wild thing — Truman Capote

When you've got nowhere to turn, turn on the gas. — Truman Capote

think of nothing things
think of wind — Truman Capote

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

The enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have. — Truman Capote

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

Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar. A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen; but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. Her face is remarkable - not unlike Lincoln's, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind; but it is delicate, too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid. "Oh my," she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, "it's fruitcake weather! — Truman Capote

A disquieting loneliness came into my life, but it induced no hunger for friends of longer acquaintance: they seemed now like a salt-free, sugarless diet. — Truman Capote

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it. — Truman Capote

If you are not admired no one will take the trouble to disapprove. — Truman Capote

Clyde's mother was an ample, olive-dark woman with the worn and disappointed look of someone who had spent her life doing things for others: occasionally the mulling plaintiveness of her voice suggested that she regretted this. — Truman Capote

Since Monday, it has been raining buoyant summer rain shot through with sun, but dark at night and full of sound, full of dripping leaves, watery chimings, sleepless scuttlings. Billy Bob is wide-awake, dry-eyed, though everything he does is a little frozen and his tongue is as stiff as a bell tongue. It has not been easy for him, Miss Bobbit's going. Because she'd meant more than that. Than what? Than being thirteen years old and crazy in love. She was the queer things in him, like the pecan tree and liking books and caring enough about people to let them hurt him. She was the things he was afraid to show anyone else. And in the dark the music trickled through the rain: won't there be nights when we will hear it just as though it were really there? And afternoons when the shadows will be all at once confused, and she will pass before us, unfurling across the lawn like a pretty piece of ribbon? — Truman Capote

You can't give your heart to a wild thing. — Truman Capote

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

What we want most is only to be held ... and told ... that everything (everything is a funny thing, is baby milk and Papa's eyes, is roaring logs on a cold morning, is hoot-owls and the boy who makes you cry after school, is Mama's long hair, is being afraid, and twisted faces on the bedroom wall) ... everything is going to be all right. — Truman Capote

I think the only person a writer has an obligation to is himself. If what I write doesn't fulfill something in me, if I don't honestly feel it's the best I can do, then I'm miserable. — Truman Capote

June, July, all through the warm months she hibernated like a winter animal who did not know spring had come and gone. — Truman Capote

It's the uncertainty concerning themselves that makes our friends conspire to deny the differences. — Truman Capote

The better the actor, the more stupid he is. — Truman Capote

I think the whole student rebellion is not really a rebellion at all....They want a certain kind of identity; they're jockeying with each other for political power in their own culture. The basis for this behavior is a desire for notoriety. — Truman Capote

Orange flavoring and vodka. They — Truman Capote

We all, sometimes, leave each other there under the skies, and we never understand why. — Truman Capote

Dolly said that when she was a girl she'd liked to wake up winter mornings and hear her father singing as he went about the house building fires; after he was old, after he'd died, she sometimes heard his songs in the field of Indian grass. Wind, Catherine said; and Dolly told her: But the wind is us - it gathers and remembers all our voices, then sends them talking and telling through the leaves and the fields - I've heard Papa clear as day. On — Truman Capote

There is considerable hypocrisy in conventionalism. Any thinking person is aware of this paradox; but in dealing with conventional people it is advantageous to treat them as though they were not hypocrites. It isn't a question of faithfulness to your own concepts; it is a matter of compromise so that you can remain an individual without the constant threat of conventional pressures. — Truman Capote

She wanted to know what American writers I liked. "Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson ... " "No, living." Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rival factor being what it is, for a contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, "Not Hemingway - a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe - all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn't living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Tender Is the Night. I really like Willa Cather. Have you read My Mortal Enemy?" With no particular expression, she said, "Actually, I wrote it. — Truman Capote

You're wrong. She is a phony. But on the other hand you're right. She isn't a phony because she's a real phony. She believes all this crap she believes. You can't talk her out of it. — Truman Capote

Do you love him?" " I told you: you can make yourself love anybody. — Truman Capote

She's such a goddamn liar maybe she don't know herself anymore. — Truman Capote

There is only one unpardonable sin
deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven. — Truman Capote

But the mean reds are horrible. You're afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don't know what you're afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don't know what that is. — Truman Capote

It was smaller than the Kidwells', and, moreover, he shared it with a wife, three active children, and a perpetually functioning television set. ("It's the only way we can keep the kids pacified. — Truman Capote

Hack, hack, hack. I wouldn't pay twenty-five cents to spit on a Georgia O'Keeffe painting. And I think she's a horrible person, too. I know her ... So arrogant, so sure of herself. I'm sure she's carrying a dildo in her purse. — Truman Capote

And I lay awake wondering if either one was bothered by it - the thought of those four graves. — Truman Capote

I have my superstitions, though. They could be termed quirks. I have to add up all numbers: there are some people I never telephone because their number adds up to an unlucky figure. Or I won't accept a hotel room for the same reason. I will not tolerate the favorite flower. I can't allow three cigarette butts in the same ashtray. Won't travel on a place with two nuns. Won't begin or end anything on a Friday. It's endless, the things I can't and won't. But I derive some curious comfort from obeying theses primitive concepts. — Truman Capote

Annabel played and sang it; she was the oldest of the sisters and the loveliest, though it was a chore to pick among them, for they were like quadruplets of unequal height. One thought of apples, compact and flavorful, sweet but cider-tart; their hair, loosely plaited, had the blue luster of a well-groomed ebony racehorse, and certain features, eyebrows, noses, lips when smiling, tilted in an original style that added humor to their charms. The nicest thing was that they were a bit plump: "pleasingly plump" describes it precisely. — Truman Capote

Miss Bobbit came tearing across the road, her finger wagging like a metronome; like a schoolteacher she clapped her hands, stamped her foot, said: "It is a well-known fact that gentlemen are put on the face of this earth for the protection of ladies. Do you suppose boys behave this way in towns like Memphis, New York,London, Hollywood or Paris?" The boys hung back, and shoved their hands in their pockets. Miss Bobbit helped the colored girl to her feet; she dusted her off, dried her eyes, held out a handkerchief and told her to blow. "A pretty pass," she said, "a fine situation when a lady can't walk safely in the public daylight. — Truman Capote