Truman Capote Quotes

It’s better to look at the sky than live there

Randolph," he said, "were you ever as young as me?" And Randolph said: "I was never so old.

June, July, all through the warm months she hibernated like a winter animal who did not know spring had come and gone.

I don't mean I'd mind being rich and famous. That's very much on my schedule and someday I'll try to get around to it.

That's all a writer has to write about - what he sees and hears and what not.

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

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

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.

Rusty thinks I should smoke marijuana, and I did for a while, but it only makes me giggle.

But I'm not a saint yet. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius.

It's a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year.

Jay Sebring cut my hair a couple of times.

Talent is a valued tormentor.

With one exception everybody who has ever been involved with me is still a great friend of mine.

Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is very difficult to look with wonder; it is best done when one is a child; after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge of childhood and walk across it.

there is only one unpardonable sin--deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven.

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.

Some prisons don't allow guitar because the strings can be detached and used as weapons.

I dream of eagles and bring forth sparrows.

That's the question: is truth an illusion, or is illusion truth, or are they essentially the same? Myself, I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true.

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.

Did you ever, in that wonderland wilderness of adolesence [sic] ever, quite unexpectedly, see something, a dusk sky, a wild bird, a landscape, so exquisite terror touched you at the bone? And you are afraid, terribly afraid the smallest movement, a leaf, say, turning in the wind, will shatter all? That is, I think, the way love is, or should be: one lives in beautiful terror.

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

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

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.

I'll never get used to anything. Anybody that does they might as well be dead.

You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.

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.

Ever since I was a child, folks have thought they had me pegged, because of the way I am, the way I talk. And they're always wrong.

People who are having a love-sex relationship are continuously lying to each other because the very nature of the relationship demands that they do, because you have to make a love object of this person, which means that you editorialize about them. You cut out what you don't want to see, you add this if it isn't there. And so therefore you're building a lie.

There is really no practical help that one can offer: it is a matter of self-discovery, of one's own conviction, 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.

My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.

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

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.

Intelligence alone can't make a good writer and style alone can't make a good writer - that is, not a really important or significant writer - but the two things together make a really good writer.

I met Lee Harvey Oswald, in Moscow just after he defected. One night I was having dinner with a friend, an Italian newspaper cor­respondent, and when he came by to pick me up he asked me if I'd mind going with him first to talk to a young American defector, one Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was staying at the Metropole, an old Czarist hotel just off Kremlin Square.

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.

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

...of all things this was the saddest, that life goes on: if one leaves one's lover, life should stop for him, and if one disappears from the world, then the world should stop, too: and it never did. And that was the real reason for most people getting up in the morning: not because it would matter but because it wouldn't.

A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.

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

Everybody has to feel superior to somebody," she said. "But it's customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege.

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

Here is a hall without exit, a tunnel without end.

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

Work is the only device I know of.

Since each story presents its own technical problems, obviously one can't generalize about them on a two-times-two-equals-four basis. Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has defined the natural shape of his story is just this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right.

She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox.