Top 400 Truman Capote Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”

— Truman Capote

Featured in: Success Quotes, Failure Quotes

2. “Good writing is rewriting.”

— Truman Capote

3. “You’re wonderful. Unique. I love you.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

Featured in: Creativity Quotes

5. “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.”

— Truman Capote

6. “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

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

— Truman Capote

8. “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.”

— Truman Capote

9. “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

— Truman Capote

10. “New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water.”

— Truman Capote

Featured in: Quotes About New York

11. “You can’t blame a writer for what the characters say.”

— Truman Capote

12. “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.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

14. “But I’m not a saint yet. I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius.”

— Truman Capote

15. “Great fury, like great whisky, requires long fermentation.”

— Truman Capote

16. “Love is a chain of love as nature is a chain of life.”

— Truman Capote

17. “It may be normal, darling; but I’d rather be natural.”

— Truman Capote

18. “I don’t care what anybody says about me as long as it isn’t true.”

— Truman Capote

19. “The better the actor, the more stupid he is.”

— Truman Capote

20. “I’ll never get used to anything. Anybody that does they might as well be dead.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

22. “Imagination, of course, can open any door – turn the key and let terror walk right in.”

— Truman Capote

23. “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.”

— Truman Capote

24. “You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who’s a friend.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

26. “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.”

— Truman Capote

27. “Home is where you feel at home. I’m still looking.”

— Truman Capote

28. “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

29. “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.”

— Truman Capote

30. “Still, when all is said, somewhere one must belong: even the soaring falcon returns to its master’s wrist.”

— Truman Capote

31. “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

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

— Truman Capote

33. “If a man doesn’t like baseball, then he must like horses, and if he doesn’t like either of them, well, I’m in trouble anyway: he don’t like girls.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

36. “I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

38. “I thought that Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment that I cut his throat.”

— Truman Capote

39. “There’s got to be something wrong with us. To do what we did.”

— Truman Capote

40. “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.”

— Truman Capote

41. “Sicily is more beautiful than any woman.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

43. “Life is difficult enough without Meryl Streep movies.”

— Truman Capote

44. “As long as you live, there’s always something waiting; and even if it’s bad, and you know it’s bad, what can you do? You can’t stop living.”

— Truman Capote

45. “I’ve got something inside of me, peasantlike and stubborn, and I’m in it till the end of the race.”

— Truman Capote

46. “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.”

— Truman Capote

47. “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

48. “I don’t want to own anything until I find a place where me and things go together.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

50. “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