Top 304 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

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.

Fame is only good for one thing - they will cash your check in a small town.

I can see every monster as they come in.

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

All literature is gossip.

When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely.

I was eleven, then I was sixteen. Though no honors came my way, those were the lovely years.

That isn't writing at all, it's typing.

Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.

The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply.

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.

Well, I'm about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy.

It is the want to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something.

Love, having no geography, knows no boundaries.

I like to talk on TV about those things that aren't worth writing about.

I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.

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

My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.

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.

Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.

No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.

Love is a chain of love as nature is a chain of life.

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

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

The good thing about masturbation is that you don't have to get dressed up for it.

You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.

That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman--the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.

You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.

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.

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

Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is very difficult to look with wonder; it is best done when one is a child; after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge of childhood and walk across it.

Most people don't find their creativity. There are more unsung geniuses that don't even know they have great talent.

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.

The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? 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.

Really being friends is the most important part, I think, of any relationship.

There were hints of sunrise on the rim of the sky, yet it was still dark, and the traces of morning color were like goldfish swimming in ink.

Have you never heard what the wise men say: all of the future exists in the past.

It's a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year.

The brain may take advice, but not the heart.

I remember things the way they should have been.

Are the dead as lonesome as the living?

I'll never get used to anything. Anybody that does they might as well be dead.

The better the actor, the more stupid he is.

Great fury, like great whisky, requires long fermentation.

I thought of the future, and spoke of the past.

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

there is only one unpardonable sin--deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven.

If you weren't here, if you could be anywhere you wanted to be, doing anything you wanted to do, where would you be and what would you be doing?

A man who doesn't dream is like a man who doesn't sweat. He stores up a lot of poison.

There is nobody in the world that you can't get if you really concentrate on it, if you really want them. You've got to want it to the exclusion of everything else.

Home is where you feel at home. I'm still looking.

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.

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.

Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.

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.

Life is difficult enough without Meryl Streep movies.