Top 304 Quotes & Sayings by Truman Capote - Page 3

That's not writing, that's typing

[T]he army of wrongness rampant in the world might as well march over me.

Half the people who snuff people, that's what they want: recognition. Get their picture in the paper.

Every day is a new day with me. All holds are off. All contracts are forgotten.

She took off her dark glasses and squinted at me. It was as though her eyes were shattered prisms, the dots of blue and gray and green like broken bits of sparkle.

Before birth; yes, what time was it then? A time like now, and when they were dead, it would be still like now: these trees, that sky, this earth, those acorn seeds, sun and wind, all the same, while they, with dust-turned hearts, change only.

She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox. In this case, as opposed to the scrupulous method of good taste and scientific grooming, the trick had been worked by exaggerating defects; she'd made them ornamental by admitting them boldly.

Oh, I adore to cook. It makes me feel so mindless in a worthwhile way.

Love should be allowed. I’m all for it. Now that I’ve got a pretty good idea what it is.

I'll wager at the end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are -- her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie pawing earth over her bone - just what they've always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.

Time. Time. What is time? Swiss manufacture it, French hoard it, Italians squander it, Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Know what I say? I say time is a crook.

Most of life is so dull it is not worth discussing, and it is dull at all ages. When we change our brand of cigarette, move to a new neighborhood, subscribe to a different newspaper, fall in and out of love, we are protesting in ways both frivolous and deep against the not to be diluted dullness of day-to-day living.

we don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am I.

Traveling wears me out.

But it's Sunday, Mr. Bell. Clocks are slow on Sundays.

I will say only that all a writer has to work with is the material he has gathered as the result of his own endeavor and observations, and he cannot be denied the right to use it. Condemn, but not deny.

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.

I haven't anything against whores, except this: some of them may have an honest tongue but they all have dishonest hearts.

New York is the only real city-city.

Maybe the older you grow and the less easy it is to put thought into action, maybe that’s why it gets all locked up in your head and becomes a burden.

Whatever relationship you have, man or woman, you have to be very attentive and you have to be a very good friend to them regardless of what they do.

I'll pay you a million dollars if you tell your life story for true.

Many universities have asked me to come for a semester but I don't want to do it because I don't have the patience.

Still, when all is said, somewhere one must belong: even the soaring falcon returns to its master's wrist.

The instant she saw the letter she squinted her eyes and bent her lips in a tough tiny smile that advanced her age immeasurably. "Darling," she instructed me, "would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn't read this sort of thing without her lipstick.

But he does look stupid.' Yearning. Not stupid. He wants awfully to be on the inside staring out: anybody with their nose pressed against a glass is liable to look stupid.

It's odd about tattoos. I've talked to several hundred men convicted of homicide-multiple homicide, in most cases. The only common denominate- I could find among them was tattoos. A good eighty percent of them were heavily tattooed.

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

Never demean yourself by talking back to a critic, never. Write those letters to the editor in your head, but don't put them on paper.

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

I also write the last paragraph or page of a story first. That way I always know what I'm working towards.

All artists are two-headed calves.

Talent is a valued tormentor.

Actually, I think friendship and love are exactly the same thing.

I guess if you're that thin and that small you don't need to take up too much space or breathe that much air. You just keep on going.

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

I loved her enough to forget myself, my self pitying despairs, and be content that something she thought happy was going to happen.

Dizzy with excitement is no mere phrase.

I think I would have written five times as much as I've written if I didn't have this terrible sense of perfection.

When I am writing, I try to do it five hours a day but I spend about two of those just fooling around.

I suppose you think I'm very brazen. Or très fou. Or something.' Not at all.' She seemed disappointed. 'Yes, you do. Everybody does. I don't mind. It's useful.

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.

He’d always been willing to confess his faults, for, by admitting them, it was as if he made them no longer exist.

I've been working, working, working, and you know, sometimes you look back at your work and you see that it just isn't any good.

So the days, the last days, blow about in a memory, hazy autumnal, all alike as leaves: until a day unlike any other I've lived

I don't think I've ever drunk champagne before breakfast before. With breakfast on several occasions, but never before before.

I told you: you can make yourself love anybody.

If you can't be friends with a lover, then forget it. It's not going to work.

I used to spend all of my time projecting. I was never in the moment. It was always tomorrow or next week or two months from now. That was one of the reasons I always had this sense of anxiety.

I'm sure Proust was a big bore.

There's lots of things you don't know. All kinds of strange things . . . mostly they happened before we were born: that makes them seem to me so much more real.

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

I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods.

The more you know about something, the harder it becomes. You become more and more of a perfectionist. I think it's a curse... It's a form of illness!

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.

At one time I used to keep notebooks with outlines for stories. But I found doing this somehow deadened the idea in my imagination. If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then you can't forget it-it will haunt you till it's written.

I think my greatest talent really is for friendship.

The way his plump hand clutched at her hip seemed somehow improper; not morally, aesthetically.

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.

I don't use a typewriter, I write longhand, with a pencil. Essentially I'm a horizontal writer. I think better when I'm lying down.