Truman Capote Quotes (88 Quotes)

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.

I'm very scared, Buster. Yes, at last. Because it could go on forever. Not knowing what's yours until you've thrown it away.

She's such a goddamn liar maybe she don't know herself anymore.

Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.

It may be normal, darling; but I'd rather be natural.

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

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

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

Those final weeks, spanning end of summer and the beginning of another autumn, are blurred in memory, perhaps because our understanding of each other had reached that sweet depth where two people communicate more often in silence than in words: an affectionate quietness replaces the tensions, the unrelaxed chatter and chasing about that produce a friendship's more showy, more, in the surface sense, dramatic moments.

As Miss Golightly was saying, before she was so rudely interrupted...

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

You're wonderful. Unique. I love you.

But it's Sunday, Mr. Bell. Clocks are slow on Sundays.

Leave it to me: I'm always top banana in the shock department.

You're wrong. She is a phony. But on the other hand you're right. She isn't a phony because she's a real phony. She believes all this crap she believes. You can't talk her out of it.

Dizzy with excitement is no mere phrase.

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

A sensible question, as Mrs. Clare, an admirer of logic, though a curious interpreter of it, was driven to admit.

For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap-and-lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening of the cheeks.

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

I despise people who can't control themselves.

Good luck and believe me, dearest Doc - it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.

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.

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

He wants awfully to be inside staring out: anybody with their nose pressed against a glass is liable to look stupid.

My yardstick is how somebody treats me.

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

Home is where you feel at home. I'm still looking.

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

I've tried to believe, but I don't, I can't, and there's no use pretending.

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

Oh Jesus God we did belong to each other. He was mine.

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.

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

Perhaps, like most of us in a foreign country, he was incapable of placing people, selecting a frame for their picture, as he would at home; therefore all Americans had to be judged in a pretty equal light, and on this basis his companions appeared to be tolerable examples of local color and national character.

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

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

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.

There's got to be something wrong with us. To do what we did.

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

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.

Those fellows, they're always crying over killers. Never a thought for the victims.

I told you: you can make yourself love anybody.

She took off her dark glasses and squinted at me. It was as though her eyes were shattered prisms, the dots of blue and gray and green like broken bits of sparkle.

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

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.

the part that he has been waiting for. He's 38 years old. He's never led a movie successfully. When I say 'successfully,' I mean like to the point where it took root in the culture and became a fixture in the culture ... For all of the respect that he gets, it hasn't happened. And this is a role that required everything he absolutely had. This thing took a lot out of him.

The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply.

Love is a chain of love as nature is a chain of life.

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.