Truman Capote Quotes

150 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
Brazil was beastly but Buenos Aires the best. Not Tiffany's, but almost.

Truman Capote
In the disposition of capital cases in the United States, the median elapsed time between sentence and execution is approximately seventeen months. [...] However, 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 [...].

Truman Capote
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.

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

Truman Capote
Great fury, like great whiskey, requires long fermentation.

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

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

Truman Capote
I didn't want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.

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
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.

Truman Capote
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.

Truman Capote
Disco is the best floor show in town. It's very democratic, boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and Marxists, Chinese and everything else, all in one big mix.

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

Truman Capote
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.

Truman Capote
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.

Truman Capote
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?

Truman Capote
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.

Truman Capote
It's such a useless thing for a man to want to be: the p-p-president of Brazil.

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
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.

Truman Capote
To wake up one morning and feel that I was a last a grown-up person, emptied of resentment, vengeful thoughts and other wasteful childish emotions. To find myself, in other words, an adult. Truman Capote

Truman Capote
Would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn't read this sort of thing without her lipstick.

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

Truman Capote