Top 400 Truman Capote Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Champagne does have one regular drawback: swilled as a regular thing a certain sourness settles in the tummy, and the result is permanent bad breath. Really incurable.”

— Truman Capote

202. “He cannot tolerate feelings of frustration as a more normal person can, and he is poorly able to rid himself of those feelings except through antisocial activity...”

— Truman Capote

203. “Work is the only device I know of.”

— Truman Capote

204. “Passing through the orchard, Mr. Clutter proceeded along beside the river, which was shallow here and strewn with islands – midstream beaches of soft sand, to which, on Sundays gone by, hot-weather Sabbaths when Bonnie had still “felt up to things,” picnic baskets had been carted, family afternoons whiled away waiting for a twitch at the end of a fishline.”

— Truman Capote

205. “We just sort of of took up by the river one day, we don’t belong to each other : he’s an independent, and so am I. I don’t want to own anything until I know I’ve found the place where me and things belong together. I’m not quite sure where that is just yet. But I know what it’s like.”

— Truman Capote

206. “People did usually look at her, because she suggested the engaging young person at a party to whom you would like to be introduced, and others because they knew she was Grady McNeil, the daughter of an important man. There were a few whose eyes she held for a different reason: and it was because, in her aura of willful and privileged enchantment, they sensed she was a girl to whom something was going to happen.”

— Truman Capote

207. “But there were moments when she played songs that made you wonder where she learned them, where indeed she came from. Harsh-tender wandering tunes with words that smacked of pinewoods or prairie. One went: Don’t wanna sleep, Don’t wanna die, Just wanna go a-travelin’ through the pastures of the sky; and this one seemed to gratify her the most, for often she continued it long after her hair hard dried, after the sun had gone and there were lighted windows in the dusk.”

— Truman Capote

208. “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.”

— Truman Capote

209. “Good taste is the death of art.”

— Truman Capote

210. “Are the dead as lonesome as the living?”

— Truman Capote

211. “Nobody likes naughtiness.”

— Truman Capote

212. “It was a changeling’s face, and mirror-guided experiments had taught him how to ring the changes, how to look now ominous, now impish, now soulful; a tilt of the head, a twist of the lips, and the corrupt gypsy became the gentle romantic. His.”

— Truman Capote

213. “Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment; with all its gloom, it still was a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be.”

— Truman Capote

214. “Freedom may be the most important thing in life, but there’s such a thing as too much freedom.”

— Truman Capote

215. “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.”

— Truman Capote

216. “Those who Know Best decide that I belong in a military school. And so follows a miserable succession of bugle-blowing prisons, grim reveille-ridden summer camps. I have a new home too. But it doesn’t count. Home is where my friend is, and there I never go.”

— Truman Capote

217. “Grady for an instant felt the oddest loss: poor Peter, he knew her even less, she realized, than Apple, and yet, because he was her only friend, she wanted to tell him: not now, sometime. And what would he say? Because he was Peter, she trusted him to love her more: if not, then let the sea usurp their castle, not the one they’d built to keep life out, it was already gone, at least for her, but another, that one sheltering friendships and promises.”

— Truman Capote

218. “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.”

— Truman Capote

219. “A person ought to be able to marry men or women or – listen, if you came to me and said you wanted to hitch up with Man O’ War, I’d respect your feeling. No, I’m serious. Love should be allowed. I’m all for it.”

— Truman Capote

220. “Before birth; yes, what time was it then? A time like now, and when they were dead, it would be still like now: these trees, that sky, this earth, those acorn seeds, sun and wind, all the same, while they, with dust-turned hearts, change only.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

222. “I know the next best thing is often the very best.”

— Truman Capote

223. “She’s such a goddamn liar maybe she don’t know herself anymore.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

225. “I knew damn well I’d never be a movie star. It’s too hard; and if you’re intelligent, it’s too embarrassing.”

— Truman Capote

226. “They’ve had the old clap-yo’-hands so many times it amounts to applause.”

— Truman Capote

227. “Perhaps, like most of us in a foreign country, he was incapable of placing people, selecting a frame for their picture, as he would at home; therefore all Americans had to be judged in a pretty equal light, and on this basis his companions appeared to be tolerable examples of local color and national character.”

— Truman Capote

228. “Call it precious and go to hell, but I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence – especially if it occurs toward the end – or a mistake in paragraphing, even punctuation. Henry James is the maestro of the semicolon. Hemingway is a first-rate paragrapher. From the point of view of ear, Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence. I don’t mean to imply that I successfully practice what I preach. I try, that’s all.”

— Truman Capote

229. “He’d always been willing to confess his faults, for, by admitting them, it was as if he made them no longer exist.”

— Truman Capote

230. “She was still hugging the cat. “Poor slob,” she said, tickling his head, “poor slob without a name. It’s a little inconvenient, his not having a name. But I haven’t any right to give him one: He’ll have to wait until he belongs to somebody. We just sort of hooked up by the river one day, we don’t belong to each other. He’s an independent, and so am I. I don’t want to own anything until I know I’ve found a place where me and things belong together.”

— Truman Capote

231. “Flannery O’Connor had a certain genius. I don’t think John Updike has, or Norman Mailer or William Styron, all of whom are talented, but they don’t exceed themselves in any way. 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

232. “I’ve got to stay awake,′ she said, punching her cheeks until the roses came. ‘There isn’t time to sleep, I’d look consumptive, I’d sag like a tenement, and that wouldn’t be fair: a girl can’t go to Sing Sing with a green face.”

— Truman Capote

233. “I can’t get excited about a man until he’s forty-two. I know this idiot girl who keeps telling me I ought to go to a head-shrinker; she says I have a father complex. Which is so merde. I simply trained myself to like older men, and it was the smartest thing I ever did.”

— Truman Capote

234. “I like to talk on TV about those things that aren’t worth writing about.”

— Truman Capote

235. “Aside from all else, there is some truth in that; clocks indeed must have their sacrifice: what is death but an offering to time and eternity?”

— Truman Capote

236. “I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.”

— Truman Capote

237. “There’s never two of anything.”

— Truman Capote

238. “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.”

— Truman Capote

239. “The question is this – do poor, plainly guilty defendants have a right to a complete defense? I do not believe that the State of Kansas would be either greatly or for long harmed by the death of these appellants. But I do not believe it could ever recover from the death of due process.”

— Truman Capote

240. “Randolph,” he said, “were you ever as young as me?” And Randolph said: “I was never so old.”

— Truman Capote

241. “She was through the doors before I recognized her, which was pardonable, for Holly and libraries were not an easy association to make. I let curiosity guide me between the lions, debating on the way whether I should admit following her or pretend coincidence.”

— Truman Capote

242. “Days, fast fading as snowflakes, flurry into autumn, fall all around like November leaves, the sky, cold red with winter, frightens with the light it sheds.”

— Truman Capote

243. “I thought Lord of the Flies was one of the great rip-offs of our time. Complete steal from A High Wind In Jamaica. He just literally lifted the entire theme, plot, and virtually characterization from A High Wind In Jamaica, turned them into a bunch of small boys and placed it on an island. Otherwise it’s precisely the same novel.”

— Truman Capote

244. “Very few authors, especially the unpublished, can resist an invitation to read aloud.”

— Truman Capote

245. “And I lay awake wondering if either one was bothered by it – the thought of those four graves.”

— Truman Capote

246. “Oscar Wilde is one of the people that I would have most liked to know. I’m sure I would have liked him a lot.”

— Truman Capote

247. “This part of Alabama is swampy, with mosquitoes that could murder a buffalo, given half a chance, not to mention dangerous flying roaches and a posse of local rats big enough to haul a wagon train from here to Timbuctoo.”

— Truman Capote

248. “You can do films for the fun of it, or the thrill of it, but certain films you can’t do unless there’s something driving you, something you have a passion for that will pull you through.”

— Truman Capote

249. “A flower was blooming inside him, and soon, when all tight leaves unfurled, when the noon of youth burned whitest, he would turn and look, as others had, for the opening of another door.”

— Truman Capote

250. “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?”

— Truman Capote