Top 400 Truman Capote Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Truman Capote

102. “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

103. “It was ideal apple-eating weather; the whitest sunlight descended from the purest sky, and an easterly wind rustled, without ripping loose, the last of the leaves on the Chinese elms.”

— Truman Capote

104. “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.”

— Truman Capote

105. “Have you never heard what the wise man say : all of the future exists in the past.”

— Truman Capote

106. “Small towns are best for spending Christmas, I think. They catch the mood quicker and change and come alive under its spell.”

— Truman Capote

107. “The feeble-minded, the neurotic, the criminal, perhaps, also, the artist, have unpredictability and perverted innocence in common.”

— Truman Capote

108. “All literature is gossip.”

— Truman Capote

109. “If you sweep a house, and tend its fires and fill its stove, and there is love in you all the years you are doing this, then you and that house are married, that house is yours.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

111. “I don’t use a typewriter, I write longhand, with a pencil. Essentially I’m a horizontal writer. I think better when I’m lying down.”

— Truman Capote

112. “I can see every monster as they come in.”

— Truman Capote

113. “He loved her, he loved her, and until he’d loved her she had never minded being alone...”

— Truman Capote

114. “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

115. “It should take you about four seconds to walk from here to the door. I’ll give you two.”

— Truman Capote

116. “Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

118. “I thought of the future, and spoke of the past.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

120. “Fame is only good for one thing – they will cash your check in a small town.”

— Truman Capote

121. “Wrinkles and bones, white hair and diamonds: I can’t wait.”

— Truman Capote

122. “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

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

— Truman Capote

124. “Norman Mailer thinks William Burroughs is a genius, which I think is ludicrous beyond words. I don’t think William Burroughs has an ounce of talent.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

126. “Now listen to me, Buddy: there is only one unpardonable sin – deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven. That, never.”

— Truman Capote

127. “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.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

129. “I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

131. “All artists are two-headed calves.”

— Truman Capote

132. “Rusty thinks I should smoke marijuana, and I did for a while, but it only makes me giggle.”

— Truman Capote

133. “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.”

— Truman Capote

134. “It was ideal apple-eating weather; the whitest sunlight descended from the purest sky, and an easterly wind rustled, without ripping loose, the last of the leaves on the Chinese elms. 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.”

— Truman Capote

135. “It’s redundant to die in Los Angeles.”

— Truman Capote

136. “And it wasn’t because of anything the Clutters did. They never hurt me. Like other people. Like people have all my life. Maybe it’s just the Clutters were the ones that had to pay for it.”

— Truman Capote

137. “If you let yourself love a wild thing. You’ll end up looking at the sky.”

— Truman Capote

138. “You pursue the negative,” Willie-Jay had informed him once, in one of his lectures. “You want not to give a damn, to exist without responsibility, without faith or friends or warmth.”

— Truman Capote

139. “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.”

— Truman Capote

140. “Here is a hall without exit, a tunnel without end.”

— Truman Capote

141. “Well, I’m about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy.”

— Truman Capote

142. “I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment.”

— Truman Capote

143. “It’s like Tiffany’s,” she said. “Not that I give a hoot about jewelry. Diamonds, yes. But it’s tacky to wear diamonds before you’re forty; and even that’s risky. They only look right on the really old girls. Maria Ouspenskaya. Wrinkles and bones, white hair and diamonds. I can’t wait.”

— Truman Capote

144. “Are there any writers on the literary scene whom I consider truly great? Yes: Truman Capote.”

— Truman Capote

145. “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 quiteness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there.”

— Truman Capote

146. “My yardstick is how somebody treats me.”

— Truman Capote

147. “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. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don’t know what it is.”

— Truman Capote

148. “A boy has to peddle his book.”

— Truman Capote

149. “Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pearl sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote