Capote Quotes

Since Monday, it has been raining buoyant summer rain shot through with sun, but dark at night and full of sound, full of dripping leaves, watery chimings, sleepless scuttlings. Billy Bob is wide-awake, dry-eyed, though everything he does is a little frozen and his tongue is as stiff as a bell tongue. It has not been easy for him, Miss Bobbit's going. Because she'd meant more than that. Than what? Than being thirteen years old and crazy in love. She was the queer things in him, like the pecan tree and liking books and caring enough about people to let them hurt him. She was the things he was afraid to show anyone else. And in the dark the music trickled through the rain: won't there be nights when we will hear it just as though it were really there? And afternoons when the shadows will be all at once confused, and she will pass before us, unfurling across the lawn like a pretty piece of ribbon? ~ Truman Capote

What do you think? This ought to be the right kind of place for tough guy like you. Garbage cans. Rats galore. Plenty of cat-bums to gang around with. So scram,' she said, dropping him…
'...I told you. We just met by the river one day: that's all. Independents, both of us. We never made each other any promises. We never -' she said, and her voice collapsed, a tic, an invalid whiteness seized her face. The car had paused for a traffic light. Then she had the door open, she was running down the street; and I ran after her.
...she shuddered, she had to grip my arm to stand up: 'Oh, Jesus God. We did belong to each other. He was mine.' Then I made her a promise, I said I'd come back and find her cat. 'I'll take care of him, too. I promise.'
She smiled: that cheerless new pinch of a smile. 'But what about me?' she said, whispered, and shivered again. 'I'm very scared, Buster. Yes, at last. Because it could go on forever. Not knowing what's yours until you're thrown it away. The mean reds, they're nothing... ~ Truman Capote

You don't understand. You've never hated anybody.
No, I never have. We're allotted just so much time on earth, and I wouldn't want the Lord to see me wasting mine in any such manner. ~ Truman Capote

Call it precious and go to hell, but I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence - especially if it occurs toward the end - or a mistake in paragraphing, even punctuation. Henry James is the maestro of the semicolon. Hemingway is a first-rate paragrapher. From the point of view of ear, Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence. I don't mean to imply that I successfully practice what I preach. I try, that's all. ~ Truman Capote

But there were moments when she played songs that made you wonder where she learned them, where indeed she came from. Harsh-tender wandering tunes with words that smacked of pinewoods or prairie. One went: Don't wanna sleep, Don't wanna die, Just wanna go a-travelin' through the pastures of the sky; and this one seemed to gratify her the most, for often she continued it long after her hair hard dried, after the sun had gone and there were lighted windows in the dusk. ~ Truman Capote

The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. His works means nothing, otherwise. It has no meaning. ~ Truman Capote

You know those days when you get the mean reds?"
"Same as the blues?"
"No," she said slowly. "No, the blues are because you're getting fat or maybe it's been raining too long. You're sad, that's all. But the mean reds are horrible. You're afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don't know what you're afraid of ... ~ Truman Capote

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

Royal summoned mourners. They came from the village, from the neighboring hills and, wailing like dogs at midnight, laid siege to the house. Old women beat their heads against the walls, moaning men prostrated themselves: it was the art of sorrow, and those who best mimicked grief were much admired. After the funeral everyone went away, satisfied that they'd done a good job. ~ Truman Capote

I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together. I'm not quite sure where that is just yet. But I know what it's like. ~ Truman Capote

So little, once it has changed, changes back. ~ 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

As far as responsibility goes, no one really wants it -- but all of us are responsible to the community we live in & its laws. ~ Truman Capote

Dizzy with excitement is no mere phrase. ~ Truman Capote

Ants - the pious insect, Randolph called them: they fill me with oh so much admiration and ah oh so much gloom: such puritan spirit in their mindless march of Godly industry, but can so anti-individual a government admit the poetry of what is past understanding? Certainly the man who refused to carry his crumb would find assassins on his trail, and doom in every smile. As for me, I prefer the solitary mole: he is no rose dependent upon thorn and root, nor ant whose time of being is organized by the analterable herd: sightless, he goes his separate way, knowing truth and freedom are attitudes of the spirit. ~ Truman Capote

But if Miss Golightly remained unconscious of my existence, except as a doorbell convenience, I became, through the summer, rather an authority on hers. I discovered, from observing the trash-basket outside her door, that her regular reading consisted of tabloids and travel folders and astrological charts; that she smoked an esoteric cigarette called Picayunes; survived on cottage cheese and Melba Toast; that her vari-colored hair was somewhat self-induced. The same source made it evident that she received V-letters by the bale. They were torn into strips like bookmarks. I used occasionally to pluck myself a bookmark in passing. Remember and miss you and rain and please write and damn and goddamn were the words that recurred most often on these slips; those, and lonesome and love. ~ Truman Capote

What I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter's evening. ~ Truman Capote

There's things that you don't want to do and they keep haunting you and following you. Bennett Miller directed this project [Capote], who is a friend of mine since I was 16, and Danny Futterman wrote it, and he's also been a friend of mine since I was 16. ~ Philip Seymour Hoffman

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

I can't accept overnight what I've always denied. ~ Truman Capote

A plaster girl with intense glass eyes sat astride a bicycle pedaling at the maddest pace; though its wheel spokes spun hypnotically, the bicycle of course never budged: all that effort and the poor girl going nowhere. It was a pitifully human situation, and one that Sylvia could so exactly identify with herself that she always felt a real pang. ~ 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

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. ~ Truman Capote

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

The compulsively superstitious person is also very often a serious believer in fate; that was the case with Perry. ~ Truman Capote

Mick Jagger moves like a parody between a majorette girl and Fred Astaire. ~ Truman Capote

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. ~ Truman Capote

It's redundant to die in Los Angeles. ~ Truman Capote

Now listen to me, Buddy: there is only one unpardonable sin - deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven. That, never. ~ Truman Capote

Sorrow and profound fatigue are at the heart of Dewey's silence. It had been his ambition to learn "exactly what happened in that house that night." Twice now he'd been told, and the two versions were very much alike, the only serious discrepancy being that Hickock attributed all four deaths to Smith, while Smith contended that Hickock had killed the two women. But the confessions, though they answered
questions of how and why, failed to satisfy his sense of meaningful design. The crime was a psychological accident, virtually an impersonal act; the victims might as well have been killed by lightning. Except for one thing: they had experienced prolonged terror, they had suffered. And Dewey could not forget their sufferings. Nonetheless, he found it possible to look at the man beside him without anger - with, rather, a measure of sympathy - for Perry Smith's life had been no bed of roses but pitiful, an ugly and lonely progress toward one mirage and then another. Dewey's sympathy, however, was not deep enough to accommodate either forgiveness or mercy. He hoped to see Perry and his partner hanged - hanged back to back. ~ Truman Capote

What we want most is only to be held ... and told ... that everything (everything is a funny thing, is baby milk and Papa's eyes, is roaring logs on a cold morning, is hoot-owls and the boy who makes you cry after school, is Mama's long hair, is being afraid, and twisted faces on the bedroom wall) ... everything is going to be all right. ~ 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 art is the act of solving a mystery. ~ Truman Capote

It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker ~ Truman Capote

I think the whole student rebellion is not really a rebellion at all....They want a certain kind of identity; they're jockeying with each other for political power in their own culture. The basis for this behavior is a desire for notoriety. ~ Truman Capote

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor. ~ Truman Capote

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

How was it that such effort, such plain virtue, could overnight be reduced to this - smoke, thinning as it rose and was received by the big, annihilating sky? ~ Truman Capote

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

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

I like to talk on TV about those things that aren't worth writing about. ~ Truman Capote

But if you live your life without feeling and compassion for your fellowman - you are as an animal - 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth' & happiness & peace of mind is not attained by living thus. ~ Truman Capote

Never love a wild thing ~ Truman Capote

They shared a doom against which virtue was no defense ~ Truman Capote

I love 'Capote.' Huge fan of Philip Seymour Hoffman; if he's not my all-time favorite actor he's definitely in my top five. I just love him so much. ~ Chris Pratt

In school we only learn to recognize the words and to spell but the application of these words to real life is another thing that only life and living can give us. ~ Truman Capote

Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment; with all its gloom, it still was a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be. ~ Truman Capote

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. ~ Truman Capote

New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water. ~ Truman Capote

Morning was in the room and pigeons were gargling on the fire escape. ~ Truman Capote

I felt infuriatingly left out
a tugboat in drydock while she, glittery voyager of secure destination, steamed down the harbor with whistles whistling and confetti in the air. ~ Truman Capote

The feeble-minded, the neurotic, the criminal, perhaps, also, the artist, have unpredictability and perverted innocence in common. ~ Truman Capote

He cannot tolerate feelings of frustration as a more normal person can, and he is poorly able to rid himself of those feelings except through antisocial activity ... ~ Truman Capote

Watching her, I remembered a girl I'd known in school, a grind, Mildred Grossman. Mildred: with her moist hair and greasy spectacles, her strained fingers that dissected frogs and carried coffee to picket lines, her flat eyes that only turned toward the stars to estimate their chemical tonnage. Earth and air could not be more opposite than Mildred and Holly, yet in my head they acquired a Siamese twinship, and the thread of thought that had sewn them together ran like this: the average personality reshapes frequently, every few years even our bodies undergo a complete overhaul--desirable or not, it is a natural thing that we should change. All right, here were two people who never would. That is what Mildred Grossman had in common with Holly Golightly. They would never change because they'd been given their character too soon; which, like sudden riches, leads to a lack of proportion: the one had splurged herself into a top-heavy realist, the other a lopsided romantic. I imagined them in a restaurant of the future, Mildred still studying the menu for its nutritional values, Holly still gluttonous for everything on it. It would never be different. They would walk through life and out of it with the same determined step that took small notice of those cliffs at the left. ~ Truman Capote

the city swayed in a squall-like downpour. Sharks might have swum through the air, ~ Truman Capote

Then starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat. ~ Truman Capote

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

Crystal spheres imprisoning green lizards, salamanders, millefiori bouquets dragonflies, a basket of pears, butterflies alighted on a frond of fern, swirls of pink and white and blue and white, shimmering like fireworks, cobras ready to strike, pretty little arrangements of pansies, magnificent poinsettias ... ~ Truman Capote

She is still a child. ~ Truman Capote

More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones. ~ Truman Capote

In the courtyard there was an angel of black stone, and its angel head rose above giant elephant leaves; the stark glass angel eyes, bright as the bleached blue of sailor eyes, stared upward. One observed the angel from an intricate green balcony - mine, this balcony, for I lived beyond in three old white rooms, rooms with elaborate wedding-cake ceilings, wide sliding doors, tall French windows. On warm evenings, with these windows open, conversation was pleasant there, tuneful, for wind rustled the interior like fan-breeze made by ancient ladies. And on such warm evenings this town is quiet. Only voices: family talk weaving on an ivy-curtained porch; a barefoot woman humming as she rocks a sidewalk chair, lulling to sleep a baby she nurses quite publicly; the complaining foreign tongue of an irritated lady who, sitting on her balcony, plucks a fryer, the loosened feathers floating from her hands, slipping into air, sliding lazily downward. ~ Truman Capote

A very fine artist can take something quite ordinary and, through sheer artistry and willpower, turn it into a work of art. ~ Truman Capote

For a long while- for many years, in fact- he had not thought of how it was before he came to the farm. His memory of those times was like a house where no one lives and where the furniture has rotted away. But tonight it was as if lamps had been lighted through all the gloomy dead rooms. It had begun to happen when he saw Tico Feo coming through the dusk with his splendid guitar. Until that moment he had not been lonesome. Now, recognizing his loneliness, he felt alive. He had not wanted to be alive. To be alive was to remember brown rivers where the fish run, and sunlight on a lady's hair. ~ Truman Capote

I am the heterosexual Truman Capote. ~ Joseph Epstein

In fact, the most interesting writing I did during those days was the plain everyday observations that I recorded in my journal. Descriptions of a neighbor... Local gossip. A kind of reporting, a style of 'seeing' and 'hearing' that would later seriously influence me, though I was unaware of it then, for all my 'formal' writing, the stuff that I published and carefully typed, was more or less fictional. ~ Truman Capote

You are a man of extreme passion, a hungry man not quite sure where his appetite lies, a deeply frustrated man striving to project his individuality against a backdrop of rigid conformity. You exist in a half-world suspended between two superstructures, one self-expression and the other self-destruction. You are strong, but there is a flaw in your strength, and unless you learn to control it the flaw will prove stronger than your strength and defeat you. The flaw? Explosive emotional reaction out of all proportion to the occasion. Why? Why this unreasonable anger at the sight of others who are happy or content, this growing contempt for people and the desire to hurt them? All right, you think they're fools, you despise them because their morals, their happiness is the source of your frustration and resentment. But these are dreadful enemies you carry within yourself--in time destructive as bullets. Mercifully, a bullet kills its victim. This other bacteria, permitted to age, does not kill a man but leaves in its wake the hulk of a creature torn and twisted; there is still fire within his being but it is kept alive by casting upon it faggots of scorn and hate. He may successfully accumulate, but he does not accumulate success, for he is his own enemy and is kept from truly enjoying his achievements. ~ Truman Capote

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

impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises - on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive ~ Truman Capote

Mrs. Bob Johnson, the wife of the New York Life Insurance agent, is an excellent cook, ~ Truman Capote

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

In California everyone goes to a therapist, is a therapist, or is a therapist going to a therapist. ~ Truman Capote

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. ~ Truman Capote

Is it - I'm not certain - possible to love someone if your first interest is the use you can make of him? Doesn't the gainful motive, and the guilt accruing to it, halt the progression of other emotions? It can be argued that even the most decently coupled people were initially magnetized by the mutual-exploitation principle - sex, shelter, appeased ego; but still that is trivial, human: the difference between that and truly using another person is the difference between edible mushrooms and the kind that kill: Unspoiled Monsters. ~ Truman Capote

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. ~ Truman Capote

You musn't give your heart to a wild thing. ~ Truman Capote

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. So blow your nose. ~ Truman Capote

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

I can see every monster as they come in. ~ Truman Capote

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. ~ 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

A flower was blooming inside him, and soon, when all tight leaves unfurled, when the noon of youth burned whitest, he would turn and look, as others had, for the opening of another door. ~ 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

I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. ~ Truman Capote

Excitement - a variety of creative coma - overcame me. ~ Truman Capote

I can't get excited about a man until he's forty-two. I know this idiot girl who keeps telling me I ought to go to a head-shrinker; she says I have a father complex. Which is so merde. I simply trained myself to like older men, and it was the smartest thing I ever did. ~ Truman Capote

All the visitors do make an effort to look their best and it's very tender, it's sweet as hell, the way the women wear their prettiest everything, I mean the old ones and the really poor ones too, they make the dearest effort to look nice and smell nice too, and I love them for it. I love the kids too, especially the colored ones. I mean the kids the wives bring. It should be sad, seeing the kids there, but it isn't, they have ribbons in their hair and lots of shine on their shoes, you'd think there was going to be ice cream; and sometimes that's what it's like in the visitors' room, a party. Anyway, it's not like the movies: you know, grim whisperings through a grille. There isn't any grille, just a counter between you and them, and the kids can stand on it to be hugged; all you have to do to kiss somebody is lean across. What I like most, they're so happy to see each other, they've saved up so much to talk about, it isn't possible to be dull, they keep laughing and holding hands. It's different afterwards," she said. "I see them on the train. They sit so quiet watching the river go by. ~ Truman Capote

So the days, the last days, blow about in a memory, hazy autumnal, all alike as leaves: until a day unlike any other I've lived ~ Truman Capote

My yardstick is how somebody treats me. ~ Truman Capote

All his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved. ~ Truman Capote

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

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

Because it's indeed difficult to portray, in any meaningful depth, another being, his appearance, speech, mentality, without to some degree, and often for quite trifling cause, offending him. The truth seems to be the nobody likes to see himself described as he is, or cares to see exactly set down what he said and did. Well, even i can understand that - because i don't like it myself when I am the sitter not the portraitist: the frailty of egos- and the more accurate the strokes, the greater the resentment. ~ Truman Capote

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. ~ Truman Capote

You are a human being with a free will. Which puts you above the animal level. But if you live your life without feeling and compassion for your fellowman - you are as an animal - "an ~ Truman Capote

Autumns reward western Kansas for the evils that the remaining seasons impose: winter's rough Colorado winds and hip-high, sheep-slaughtering snows; the slushes and the strange land fogs of spring; and summer, when even crows seek the puny shade, and the tawny infinitude of wheatstalks bristle, blaze. At last, after September, another weather arrives, an Indian summer that occasionally endures until Christmas. ~ Truman Capote

Party of the Century by Deborah Davis, about Truman Capote's famous Black and White Ball. Capote by Gerald Clarke. Truman Capote by George Plimpton. Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. by Sam Wasson. Slim, the memoir of Slim Keith. And The Sisters by David Grafton, about Babe Paley and her sisters. ~ Melanie Benjamin

though some gifted tailor had almost succeeded in camouflaging his plump and spankable bottom. ~ Truman Capote

[ New York ] is a place that worships incompetence particularly if it's combined with energy and paranoid self-confidence. Only in a city like New York could Truman Capote have made it, or John Simon. ~ Gore Vidal

But the mean reds are horrible. You're afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don't know what you're afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don't know what that is. ~ Truman Capote

Truman Capote famously claimed to have nearly absolute recall of dialogue and used his prodigious memory as an excuse never to take notes or use a tape recorder, but I suspect his memory claims were just a useful cover to invent dialogue whole cloth. ~ Joshua Foer