Truman Capote Quotes

150 Sourced Quotes

Norman Mailer thinks William Burroughs is a genius, which I think is ludicrous beyond words. I don't think William Burroughs has an ounce of talent.

Truman Capote

There is only one unpardonable sin—deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven.

Truman Capote

I've said it about myself but I really meant it about all artists. I think that all artists are two-headed calves.

Truman Capote

I never write anything that I don't think will be paid for.

Truman Capote

Hulga the whole while hollering like a half-slaughtered hog. (Attention, students of literature! Alliteration - have you noticed? - is my least vice.)

Truman Capote

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.

Truman Capote

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

Truman Capote

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.

Truman Capote

There is really no practical help that one can offer; it is a matter of self-discovery, of one's own convictions, or working with one's own work; your style is what seems natural to you. It is a long process of discovery, one that never ends. I am working at it, and will be as long as I live.

Truman Capote

When the prisoner is brought down from Death Row he steps from the elevator directly into a "holding" room that adjoins the witness room. There are two cells in this "holding" room, two, in case it's a double execution. They're ordinary cells, just like this one, and the prisoner spends his last night there before his execution in the morning, reading, listening to the radio, playing cards with the guards.

Truman Capote

It's like a jumble of huts in a jungle somewhere. I don't understand how you can live there. It's really, completely dead. Walk along the street, there's nothing moving. I've lived in small Spanish fishing villages which were literally sunny all day long everyday of the week, but they weren't as boring as Los Angeles.

Truman Capote

Of course, at their best, movies are anti-literature and, as a medium, belong not to writers, not to actors, but to directors.

Truman Capote

Then why does Kenneth Anger wear a picture locket on a chain around his neck? On one side of the locket there is a picture of you; on the other there is an image of a frog with an inscription: "Bobby Beausoleil changed into a frog by Kenneth Anger." A voodoo amulet, so to say.

Truman Capote

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

Truman Capote

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.

Truman Capote

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

Truman Capote

First, a gorgeous breakfast: just everything you can imagine from flapjacks and fried squirrel to hominy grits and honey in the comb...we're so impatient to get at the presents we can't eat a mouthful.

Truman Capote

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.

Truman Capote

There was an American girl, Priscilla Johnson. She worked for U.P. in Moscow. She knew [John] Kennedy, and she met [Lee Harvey] Oswald around the same time I did. But I can tell you something else almost as curious.

Truman Capote

One day, I started writing, not knowing that I had chained myself for life to a noble but merciless master. When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation... I'm here alone in my dark madness, all by myself with my deck of cards - and, of course, the whip God gave me.

Truman Capote

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.

Truman Capote

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?

Truman Capote

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

Truman Capote

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.

Truman Capote

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...

Truman Capote

There is such an animal as a nonstylist, only they're not writers - they're typists.

Truman Capote

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.

Truman Capote

Of course people couldn't help but think I must be a bit of a dyke myself. And of course I am. Everyone is: a bit. So what? That never discouraged a man yet, in fact it seems to goad them on.

Truman Capote

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.

Truman Capote

I knew Lee Harvey Oswald, and I knew Jack Kennedy. The odds against that-one person knowing all four of those men-must be astounding.

Truman Capote