Truman Capote Quotes

150 Sourced Quotes

This island, floating in river water like a diamond iceberg.

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

Truman Capote
If a man doesn't like baseball, then he must like horses, and if he doesn't like either of them, well, I'm in trouble anyway: he don't like girls.

Truman Capote
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.

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

Truman Capote
The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.

Truman Capote
Anyone who is consistently consistent has a head made of biscuit.

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

Truman Capote
The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. His work means nothing, otherwise. It has no meaning.

Truman Capote
The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call out there.

Truman Capote
It is no shame to have a dirty face- the shame comes when you keep it dirty.

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

Truman Capote
Any work of art, provided it springs from a sincere motivation to further understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love.

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

Truman Capote
[You've said your material chooses you.] 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.

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 favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably.

Truman Capote
Lively, too. Talky as a jaybird. With something smart to say on every subject: better than the radio.

Truman Capote
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.

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

Truman Capote
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.

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

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

Truman Capote
It seemed odd to Joel that nature did not reflect so solemn an event: flowers of cotton-boll clouds within a sky as scandalously blue as kitten-eyes were offensive to their sweet disrespect.

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

Truman Capote
It's a scientific fact that for every year you live in California, you lose two points off your I.Q. It's redundant to die in L.A.

Truman Capote
Of many magics, one is watching a beloved sleep: free of eyes and awareness, you for a sweet moment hold the heart of him; helpless, he is then all, and however irrationally, you have trusted him to be, man-pure, child-tender.

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

Truman Capote
It was a terrible, strange-looking hotel. But Little Sunshine stayed on: it was his rightful home, he said, for if he went away, as he had once upon a time, other voices, other rooms, voices lost and clouded, strummed his dreams.

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

Truman Capote
I was kind of a Hershey Bar whore—there wasn't much I wouldn't do for a nickel's worth of chocolate.

Truman Capote