Truman capote quotes

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.

Whatever relationship you have, man or woman, you have to be very attentive and you have to be a very good friend to them regardless of what they do.

We all, sometimes, leave each other there under the skies, and we never understand why.

A boy has to peddle his book.

Good writing is rewriting.

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

I always felt that nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that's why I started writing. At least on paper I could put down what I thought.

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

It's redundant to die in Los Angeles.

What we want most is 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)...is going to be alright.

Have you never heard what the wise men say: all of the future exists in the past.

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.

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

The brain may take advice, but not the heart.

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

The good thing about masturbation is that you don't have to get dressed up for it.

I haven't anything against whores, except this: some of them may have an honest tongue but they all have dishonest hearts.

The better the actor, the more stupid he is.

Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.

Mick Jagger is about as sexy as a pissing toad.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

All writing, all art, is an act of faith. If one tries to contribute to human understanding, how can that be called decadent? It's like saying a declaration of love is an act of decadence. Any work of art, provide it springs from a sincere motivation to further understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love.

And since gin to artifice bears the same relation as tears to mascara, her attractions at once dissembled.

Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell,’ Holly advised him. ‘That was Doc’s mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can’t give your heart to a wild thing; the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That’s how you’ll end up Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You’ll end up looking at the sky.

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.

It is the want to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something

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.

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

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

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

Some cities, like wrapped boxes under Christmas trees, conceal unexpected gifts, secret delights. Some cities will always remain wrapped boxes, containers of riddles never to be solved, nor even to be seen by vacationing visitors, or, for that matter, the most inquisitive, persistent travelers.

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; but if it happens, I'd like to have my ego tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's.

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.

...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.

Life is difficult enough without Meryl Streep movies.

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

I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.

I will say only that all a writer has to work with is the material he has gathered as the result of his own endeavor and observations, and he cannot be denied the right to use it. Condemn, but not deny.

That isn't writing at all, it's typing.

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

In my garden, after a rainfall, you can faintly, yes, hear the breaking of new blooms.

If you can't be friends with a lover, then forget it. It's not going to work.

It is very seldom that a person loves anyone they cannot in some way envy.

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: and why not? 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.

They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities?

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.

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

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

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

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 remember things the way they should have been.

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

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.

I can see every monster as they come in.

A man who doesn't dream is like a man who doesn't sweat. He stores up a lot of poison.

But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world's ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.

I just live one day at a time. That's my new theory in life.

They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurerance of our identities? I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was so egotist...he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the beautiful comrade, the only inseparatable love...poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point.

That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman--the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.

The true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.

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

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

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

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

I've never had an affair with somebody who wasn't at the same time a very good friend of mine, if you see what I mean.

Fame is only good for one thing - they will cash your check in a small town.

I prefer to underwrite. Simple, clear as a country creek.

I told you: you can make yourself love anybody.

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

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

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

It takes a lot of bad writing to get to a little good writing.

I'm sure Proust was a big bore.

A work of art is one of mystery, the one extreme magic; everything else is either arithmetic or biology.

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

Most people don't find their creativity. There are more unsung geniuses that don't even know they have great talent.

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.

How do I look so young? Quite simple: a complete vegetable diet, 12 hours sleep a night, and lots and lots of make-up.

Really being friends is the most important part, I think, of any relationship.

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

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

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.

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 the art of solving a mystery.

Yes: but aren't love and marriage notoriously synonymous in the minds of most women? Certainly very few men get the first without promising the second: love, that is--if it's just a matter of spreading her legs, almost any woman will do that for nothing.

I’ve tried that. I’ve tried aspirin, too. Rusty thinks I should smoke marijuana, and I did for a while, but it only makes me giggle. What I’ve found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany’s. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany’s, then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name.

There is nobody in the world that you can't get if you really concentrate on it, if you really want them. You've got to want it to the exclusion of everything else.

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.

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

Great fury, like great whisky, requires long fermentation.

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

I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon.

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

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

I am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch.

Never demean yourself by talking back to a critic, never. Write those letters to the editor in your head, but don't put them on paper.

It's bad enough in life to do without something YOU want; but confound it, what gets my goat is not being able to give somebody something you want THEM to have.

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.

Personally, I rather think that if you're not creative you've got a problem on your hands. If you are creative you've got a double problem.

Most secrets should never be told, but especially those that are more menacing to the listener than to the teller.

Shoot, boy, the country's just fulla folks what knows everything, and don't understand nothing, just fullofem.

I thought of the future, and spoke of the past.

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.

You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.

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.

Are the dead as lonesome as the living?

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?

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

Anticipation is anxiety. I have always had a very extreme anxiety thing.

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

The more you know about something, the harder it becomes. You become more and more of a perfectionist. I think it's a curse... It's a form of illness!

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.

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

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

The problem with living outside the law is that you no longer have its protection.

No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.

Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.

The most dangerous thing in the world is to make a friend of an Englishman, because he'll come sleep in your closet rather than spend 10 shillings on a hotel.

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.

When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium.

I always write the end of everything first. I always write the last chapters of my books before I write the beginning....Then I go back to the beginning. I mean, it's always nice to know where you're going is my theory.

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.