Truman Capote Quotes

I'm sure Proust was a big bore.

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.

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

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

Lee Harvey Oswald was boiling over about everything: the American ambassador; the Russians-he was mad at them because they wouldn't let him stay in Moscow. We talked to him for about half an hour, and my Italian friend didn't think the guy was worth filing a story about. Just another paranoid hysteric; the Moscow woods were rampant with those. I never thought about him again, not until many years later. Not until after the assassina­tion when I saw his picture flashed on television.

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

I couldn't understand a sense of unease that multiplied until I could hear my heart beating.

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.

But I know what I like.' She smiled, and et the cat drop to the floor. 'It's like Tiffany's,'she said. 'Not that I give a hoot about jewellery. Diamonds, yes. But it's tacky to wear diamonds before you're forty; and even that's risky.

You know the days when you get the mean reds? Paul Varjak: The mean reds. You mean like the blues? Holly Golightly: No. The blues are because you’re getting fat, and maybe it’s been raining too long. You’re just sad, that’s all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid, and you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?

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

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.

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.

Champagne does have one regular drawback: swilled as a regular thing a certain sourness settles in the tummy, and the result is permanent bad breath. Really incurable.

Never love a wild thing...If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky.

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

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.

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.

She sounds the way bananas taste.

Are there any writers on the literary scene whom I consider truly great? Yes: Truman Capote.

I'm not a character in any of my books.

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?

A boy has to peddle his book.

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

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

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

All human life has its seasons and cycles, and no one's personal chaos can be permanent. Winter, after all, gives way to spring and summer, though sometimes when branches stay dark and the earth cracks with ice, one thinks they will never come, that spring, and that summer, but they do, and always.

It's redundant to die in Los Angeles.

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.

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.

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

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 don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true.

If you sweep a house, and tend its fires and fill its stove, and there is love in you all the years you are doing this, then you and that house are married, that house is yours.

Mick Jagger is about as sexy as a pissing toad.

I know the next best thing is often the very best.

I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany´s.

You don't run out on people; you run out on yourself.

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.

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

The better the actor, the more stupid he is.

There were hints of sunrise on the rim of the sky, yet it was still dark, and the traces of morning color were like goldfish swimming in ink.

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

I've got something inside of me, peasantlike and stubborn, and I'm in it till the end of the race.

I think my greatest talent really is for friendship.

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

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.

Poor slob without a name. It's a little inconvenient, his not having a name. But I haven't the right to give him one: he'll have to wait until he belongs to somebody. We just sort of took up by the river one day, we don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am I. I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together.