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Truman Capote Quotes | Quotes said by Truman Capote

  • Truman Capote Quote #1

    ...he called after her as she
    disappeared down the path, a pretty girl in a hurry...


  • Truman Capote Quote #2

    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.

  • Truman Capote Quote #3

    A kind of silence, if I may say, was walking through the house, and, like most silence, it was not silent at all: it rapped on the doors, echoed in the clocks, creaked on the stairs, leaned forward to peer into my face and explode.

  • Truman Capote Quote #4

    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 Quote #5

    And in this moment, like a swift intake of breath, the rain came.

  • Truman Capote Quote #6

    Any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person’s nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.

  • Truman Capote Quote #7

    Are the dead as lonesome as the living?

  • Truman Capote Quote #8

    As a quartet, they struck an unmusical note, primarily the fault of Ybarra-Jaega, who seemed as out of place in their company as a violin in a jazz band.

  • Truman Capote Quote #9

    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 Quote #10

    Be consistent in your attitude towards her and do not add anything to the impression she has that you are weak, not because you need her good-will but because you can expect more letters like this, and they can only serve to increase your already dangerous anti-social instincts.

  • Truman Capote Quote #11

    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 Quote #12

    Before publication, and if provided by persons whose judgment you trust, yes, of course criticism helps. But after something is published, all I want to read or hear is praise.

  • Truman Capote Quote #13

    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 Quote #14

    Das beruhigt mich sofort, da ist es so still und alles sieht so vornehm aus, dort kann einem nichts Schlimmes zustoßen, nicht bei diesen freundlichen Herren in ihren schönen Anzügen und diesem wunderbaren Geruch nach Silber und Krokodillederbrieftaschen. Wenn ich im richtigen Leben mal einen Ort finde, wo ich mich so fühle wie bei Tiffany, dann werde ich Möbel kaufen und dem Kater einen Namen geben.

  • Truman Capote Quote #15

    Don't wanna sleep, don't wanna die, just wanna go a-travelin' through the pastures of the sky.

  • Truman Capote Quote #16

    Entonces, un día comencé a escribir, sin saber que me había encadenado de por vida a un noble pero implacable amo. Cuando Dios le entrega a uno un don, también le da un látigo; y el látigo es únicamente para autoflagelarse. [...] La diferencia entre escribir bien y el arte verdadero es sutil, pero brutal. (Capote, pág. 9)

    »[...] En un cuento de Henry James, creo que “The Middle Years”, su personaje, un escritor en las sombras de la madurez, se lamenta: “Vivimos en la oscuridad, hacemos lo que podemos, el resto es la demencia del arte”. O palabras parecidas. En cualquier caso, míster James lo expone en toda la línea; nos está diciendo la verdad. Y la parte más negra de las sombras, la zona más demencial de la locura, es el riguroso juego que conlleva. (Capote, pp. 12-13)

    »Los escritores, cuando menos aquellos que corren auténticos riesgos, que están ansiosos por morder la bala y pasar la plancha de los piratas, tienen mucho en común con otra casta de hombres solitarios: los individuos que se ganan la vida jugando al billar y dando cartas. (Capote, pág. 13)

    »[...] Para empezar, creo que la mayoría de los escritores, incluso los mejores, son recargados. Yo prefiero escribir de menos. Sencilla, claramente, como arroyo del campo. (Capote, pág. 15).

    »[...] Entretanto, aquí estoy en mi oscura demencia, absolutamente solo con mi baraja de naipes y, desde luego, con el látigo que Dios me dio (Capote, pág. 17)

  • Truman Capote Quote #17

    Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

  • Truman Capote Quote #18

    Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavour.

  • Truman Capote Quote #19

    Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

  • Truman Capote Quote #20

    Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody. You can't have too many friends because then you're just not really friends.

  • Truman Capote Quote #21

    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.

  • Truman Capote Quote #22

    Happiness leaves such slender records; it is the dark days that are so voluminously documented.

  • Truman Capote Quote #23

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

  • Truman Capote Quote #24

    Her bedroom window overlooked the garden, and now and then, usually when she was having a bad spell, Mr. Helm had seen her stand long hours gazing into the garden, as though what she saw bewitched her. (When I was a girl, she had once told a friend, 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 Quote #25

    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.

  • Truman Capote Quote #26

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

  • Truman Capote Quote #27

    I have my superstitions, though. They could be termed quirks. I have to add up all numbers: there are some people I never telephone because their number adds up to an unlucky figure. Or I won’t accept a hotel room for the same reason. I will not tolerate the favorite flower. I can’t allow three cigarette butts in the same ashtray. Won’t travel on a place with two nuns. Won’t begin or end anything on a Friday. It’s endless, the things I can’t and won’t. But I derive some curious comfort from obeying theses primitive concepts.

  • Truman Capote Quote #28

    I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was no egoist… he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the one beautiful comrade, the only inseparable love… poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point.

  • Truman Capote Quote #29

    I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Which isn't being pious. Just practical. Cancer may cool you, but the other's sure to.

  • Truman Capote Quote #30

    I'll own up: I think it is a dream, Miss Verena. But a man who doesn't dream is like a man who doesn't sweat: he stores up a lot of poison.

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