Top 304 Quotes & Sayings by Truman Capote - Page 2

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.

Most secrets should never be told, but especially those that are more menacing to the listener than to the teller.

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

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

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.

A work of art is one of mystery, the one extreme magic; everything else is either arithmetic or biology.

It’s better to look at the sky than live there

Personally, I rather think that if you're not creative you've got a problem on your hands. If you are creative you've got a double problem.

Anticipation is anxiety. I have always had a very extreme anxiety thing.

I always write the end of everything first. I always write the last chapters of my books before I write the beginning....Then I go back to the beginning. I mean, it's always nice to know where you're going is my theory.

What we want most is 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)...is going to be alright.

The wind is us-- it gathers and remembers all our voices, then sends them talking and telling through the leaves and the fields.

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

You can’t give your heart to a wild thing.

It may be normal, darling; but I'd rather be natural.

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.

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.

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.

I met Lee Harvey Oswald, in Moscow just after he defected. One night I was having dinner with a friend, an Italian newspaper cor­respondent, and when he came by to pick me up he asked me if I'd mind going with him first to talk to a young American defector, one Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was staying at the Metropole, an old Czarist hotel just off Kremlin Square.

Mick Jagger is about as sexy as a pissing toad.

It is very seldom that a person loves anyone they cannot in some way envy.

I prefer to underwrite. Simple, clear as a country creek.

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

In my garden, after a rainfall, you can faintly, yes, hear the breaking of new blooms.

A boy has to peddle his book.

I just live one day at a time. That's my new theory in life.

How do I look so young? Quite simple: a complete vegetable diet, 12 hours sleep a night, and lots and lots of make-up.

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.

I always felt that nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that's why I started writing. At least on paper I could put down what I thought.

They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities?

But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world's ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.

And yes, to answer you seriously, I am beginning to be... well, not bored, but tempted; afraid, but tempted. When you've been in pain for a long time, when you wake up every morning with a rising sense of hysteria, then boredom is what you want, marathon sleeps, a silence in yourself.

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 the art of solving a mystery.

It should take you about four seconds to walk from here to the door. I'll give you two.

They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurerance of our identities? I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was so egotist...he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the beautiful comrade, the only inseparatable love...poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point.

I don't mean I'd mind being rich and famous. That's very much on my schedule, and someday I'll try to get around to it; but if it happens, I'd like to have my ego tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have 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.

And since gin to artifice bears the same relation as tears to mascara, her attractions at once dissembled.

I am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch.

...of all things this was the saddest, that life goes on: if one leaves one's lover, life should stop for him, and if one disappears from the world, then the world should stop, too: and it never did. And that was the real reason for most people getting up in the morning: not because it would matter but because it wouldn't.

Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.

The true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.

One of the most difficult things in writing a novel or anything at all is to choose the point of view from which it's going to be told.

It takes a lot of bad writing to get to a little good writing.

Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot". ~Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's, 1958, spoken by the character Holly Golightly

You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who's a friend.

My yardstick is how somebody treats me.

Nancy Clutter is always in a hurry, but she always has time. And that's one definition of a lady.

I don't want to own anything until I find a place where me and things go together.

I live in Brooklyn. By choice. Those ignorant of its allures are entitled to wonder why.

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

Good writing is rewriting.

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.

When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium.

All writing, all art, is an act of faith. If one tries to contribute to human understanding, how can that be called decadent? It's like saying a declaration of love is an act of decadence. Any work of art, provide it springs from a sincere motivation to further understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love.

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

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.

Most people who become suddenly famous overnight will find that they lose practically eighty percent of their friends. Your old friends just can't stand it for some reason.

I’ve tried that. I’ve tried aspirin, too. Rusty thinks I should smoke marijuana, and I did for a while, but it only makes me giggle. What I’ve 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, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany’s, then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name.

It's redundant to die in Los Angeles.