Top 400 Truman Capote Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Mick Jagger moves like a parody between a majorette girl and Fred Astaire.”

— Truman Capote

152. “Throughout his life – as a child, poor and meanly treated, as a foot-loose youth, as an imprisoned man – the yellow bird, huge and parrot-faced, had soared across Perry’s dreams, an avenging angel who savaged his enemies or, as now, rescued him in moments of mortal danger.”

— Truman Capote

153. “Little things really belong to you,” she said, folding the fan. “They don’t have to be left behind. You can carry them in a shoebox.”

— Truman Capote

154. “But that’s impossible. Can you imagine Mr. Clutter missing church? Just to sleep?”

— Truman Capote

155. “Shoot, boy, the country’s just fulla folks what knows everything, and don’t understand nothing, just fullofem.”

— Truman Capote

156. “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

157. “One lost an IQ point for every year spent on the West Coast.”

— Truman Capote

158. “I remember things the way they should have been.”

— Truman Capote

159. “She sounds the way bananas taste.”

— Truman Capote

160. “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?”

— Truman Capote

161. “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.”

— Truman Capote

162. “Of course there is a Santa Claus. It’s just that no single somebody could do all he has to do. So the Lord has spread the task among us all. That’s why everybody is Santa Claus. I am. You are.”

— Truman Capote

163. “She took off her dark glasses and squinted at me. It was as though her eyes were shattered prisms, the dots of blue and gray and green like broken bits of sparkle.”

— Truman Capote

164. “The midnight hours were her time to be selfish and vain.”

— Truman Capote

165. “Es ist sehr leicht den Regen zu ignorieren, wenn man einen Regenmantel hat.”

— Truman Capote

166. “Ever since I was a child, folks have thought they had me pegged, because of the way I am, the way I talk. And they’re always wrong.”

— Truman Capote

167. “The crime was a psychological accident, virtually an impersonal act; the victims might as well have been killed by lightning.”

— Truman Capote

168. “They shared a doom against which virtue was no defense.”

— Truman Capote

169. “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.”

— Truman Capote

170. “Of course people couldn’t help but think I must be a bit of a dyke myself. And of course I am. Everyone is: a bit. So what? That never discouraged a man yet, in fact it seems to goad them on.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

172. “Any work of art, provided it springs from a sincere motivation to further understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love.”

— Truman Capote

173. “Every time you see a mirror you go into a trance, like. Like you was looking at some gorgeous piece of butt. I mean, my God, don’t you ever get tired?”

— Truman Capote

174. “All the neighbors are rattlesnakes. Varmints looking for a chance to slam the door in your face. It’s the same the whole world over.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

176. “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

177. “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

178. “I’ve been working, working, working, and you know, sometimes you look back at your work and you see that it just isn’t any good.”

— Truman Capote

179. “I’d been to a movie, come home and gone to bed with a bourbon nightcap and the newest Simenon: so much my idea of comfort that I couldn’t understand a sense of unease that multiplied until I could hear my heart beating.”

— Truman Capote

180. “I dream of eagles and bring forth sparrows.”

— Truman Capote

181. “As Miss Golightly was saying, before she was so rudely interrupted...”

— Truman Capote

182. “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.”

— Truman Capote

183. “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

184. “But when the crowd caught sight of the murderers, with their escort of blue-coated highway patrol-men, it fell silent, as though amazed to find them humanly shaped.”

— Truman Capote

185. “The compulsively superstitious person is also very often a serious believer in fate; that was the case with Perry.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

187. “Morning. Frozen rime lusters the grass; the sun, round as an orange and orange as hot-weather moons, balances on the horizon, burnishes the silvered winter woods. A wild turkey calls. A renegade hog grunts in the undergrowth.”

— Truman Capote

188. “Scrubbed, combed, as tidy as two dudes setting off on a double date, they went out to the car.”

— Truman Capote

189. “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

190. “Nothing is more usual than to feel that others have shared in our failures, just as it is an ordinary reaction to forget those who have shared in our achievements.”

— Truman Capote

191. “You are a man of extreme passion, a hungry man not quiet 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.”

— Truman Capote

192. “Most contemporary novelists, especially the American and the French, are too subjective, mesmerized by private demons; theyre enraptured by their navels and confined by a view that ends with their own toes.”

— Truman Capote

193. “The buggy is mine; that is, it was bought for me when I was born. It is made of wicker, rather unraveled, and the wheels wobble like a drunkard’s legs. But it is a faithful object; springtimes, we take it to the woods and fill it with flowers, herbs, wild fern for our porch pots; in the summer, we pile it with picnic paraphernalia and sugar-cane fishing poles and roll it down to the edge of a creek;.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

195. “If the killer wasn’t him, maybe it was you. Or somebody across the street. All the neighbors are rattlesnakes. Varmints looking for a chance to slam the door in your face. It’s the same the whole world over. You know that.”

— Truman Capote

196. “Talent is a valued tormentor.”

— Truman Capote

197. “Lively, too. Talky as a jaybird. With something smart to say on every subject: better than the radio.”

— Truman Capote

198. “It was as if I were an oyster and somebody forced a grain of sand into my shell – a grain of sand that I didn’t know was there and didn’t particularly welcome. Then a pearl started forming around the grain and it irritated me, made me angry, tortured me sometimes. But the oyster can’t help becoming obsessed with the pearl.”

— Truman Capote

199. “To wake up one morning and feel that I was a last a grown-up person, emptied of resentment, vengeful thoughts and other wasteful childish emotions. To find myself, in other words, an adult. Truman Capote.”

— Truman Capote

200. “There is such an animal as a nonstylist, only they’re not writers – they’re typists.”

— Truman Capote