Top 400 Truman Capote Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “Chrysanthemums,” my friend commented as we moved through our garden stalking flower-show blossoms with decapitating shears, “are like lions. Kingly characters. I always expect them to spring. To turn on me with a growl and a roar.”

— Truman Capote

253. “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.”

— Truman Capote

254. “As a matter of fact, Janice wrote Preacher a letter in red ink on lace-trimmed paper in which she told him he was vile beyond all human beings and words, that she considered their engagement broken, that he could have back the stuffed squirrel he’d given her. Preacher, saying he wanted to act nice, stopped her the next time she passed our house, and said, well, hell, she could keep that old squirrel if she wanted to. Afterwards, he couldn’t understand why Janice ran away bawling the way she did.”

— Truman Capote

255. “I was determined never to set a studious foot inside a college classroom. I felt that either one was or wasn’t a writer, and no combination of professors could influence the outcome.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

257. “I could leave the world with today in my eyes.”

— Truman Capote

258. “Well, it wasn’t no revelation to me cause I always knew she was a freak.”

— Truman Capote

259. “Where are you, Fred? Because it’s cold. There’s snow in the wind.”

— Truman Capote

260. “Then, touching the brim of his cap, he headed for home and the day’s work, unaware that it would be his last.”

— Truman Capote

261. “How do you feel if you’re in love? she asked. Ah, said Rosita with swooning eyes, you feel as though pepper has been sprinkled on your hear, as though tiny fish are swimming in your veins.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

263. “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

264. “She looked at me blankly, and rubbed her nose, as though it tickled; a gesture, seeing often repeated, I came to recognize as a signal that one was trespassing. Like many people with a bold fondness for volunteering intimate information, anything that suggested a direct question, a pinning-down, put her on guard.”

— Truman Capote

265. “He was a middle-aged child that had never shed its baby fat, though some gifted tailor had almost succeeded in camouflaging his plump and spankable bottom.”

— Truman Capote

266. “The instant she saw the letter she squinted her eyes and bent her lips in a tough tiny smile that advanced her age immeasurably. “Darling,” she instructed me, “would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn’t read this sort of thing without her lipstick.”

— Truman Capote

267. “That’s not bad. I can’t get excited by a man until he’s forty-two.”

— Truman Capote

268. “The instant of petrified violence that sometimes foreruns a summer storm saturated the hushed yard, and in the unearthly tinseled light rusty buckets of trailing fern which were strung round the porch like party lanterns appeared illuminated by a faint green inward flame.”

— Truman Capote

269. “Royal summoned mourners. They came from the village, from the neighboring hills and, wailing like dogs at midnight, laid siege to the house. Old women beat their heads against the walls, moaning men prostrated themselves: it was the art of sorrow, and those who best mimicked grief were much admired. After the funeral everyone went away, satisfied that they’d done a good job.”

— Truman Capote

270. “Once a thing is set to happen, all you can do is hope it won’t. Or will-depending. 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

271. “Good. But why written in three styles of script?” To which Nancy had replied: “Because I’m not grown-up enough to be one person with one kind of signature.”

— Truman Capote

272. “There’s something really the matter with most people who wear tattoos. There’s at least some terrible story. I know from experience that there’s always something terribly flawed about people who are tattooed, above some little something that Johnny had done in the Navy, even though that’s a bad sign... It’s terrible. Psychologically it’s crazy. Most people who are tattooed, it’s the sign of some feeling of inferiority, they’re trying to establish some macho identification for themselves.”

— Truman Capote

273. “If there’s somebody loose around here that wants to cut my throat, I wish him luck. What difference does it make? It’s all the same in eternity.”

— Truman Capote

274. “I think the whole student rebellion is not really a rebellion at all... They want a certain kind of identity; they’re jockeying with each other for political power in their own culture. The basis for this behavior is a desire for notoriety.”

— Truman Capote

275. “Randolph,” he said, “do you know something? I’m very happy.” To which his friend made no reply. The reason for this happiness seemed to be simply that he did not feel unhappy; rather, he knew all through him a kind of balance. There was little for him to cope with.”

— Truman Capote

276. “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

277. “Dolly said that when she was a girl she’d liked to wake up winter mornings and hear her father singing as he went about the house building fires; after he was old, after he’d died, she sometimes heard his songs in the field of Indian grass. Wind, Catherine said; and Dolly told her: But the wind is us – it gathers and remembers all our voices, then sends them talking and telling through the leaves and the fields – I’ve heard Papa clear as day. On.”

— Truman Capote

278. “One by one the household emerges, looking as though they’d like to kill us both; but it’s Christmas, so they can’t.”

— Truman Capote

279. “As he returned to his duties with a satisfied waddle, I couldn’t resist reminding her that she hadn’t answered his question. “Do you love him?” “I told you: you can make yourself love anybody.”

— Truman Capote

280. “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.”

— Truman Capote

281. “You must cross your heart and kiss your elbow.”

— Truman Capote

282. “A year ago, when they first encountered each other, he’d thought Perry “a good guy,” if a bit “stuck on himself,” “sentimental,” too much “the dreamer.” He had liked him but not considered him especially worth cultivating until, one day, Perry described a murder, telling how, simply for “the hell of it,” he had killed a colored man in Las Vegas – beaten him to death with a bicycle chain.”

— Truman Capote

283. “What I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter’s evening.”

— Truman Capote

284. “It is well known that women outlive men; could it merely be superior vanity that keeps them going?”

— Truman Capote

285. “Like many people with a bold fondness for volunteering intimate information, anything that suggested a direct question, a pinning-down, put her on guard.”

— Truman Capote

286. “A very fine artist can take something quite ordinary and, through sheer artistry and willpower, turn it into a work of art.”

— Truman Capote

287. “It’s better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes.”

— Truman Capote

288. “Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.”

— Truman Capote

289. “When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely.”

— Truman Capote

290. “On the opposite bank, a hummingbird, whirring it’s invisible wings, ate the heart of a giant tiger lily.”

— Truman Capote

291. “It was the master stroke, that stutter; for it contrived to make her banalities sound somehow original, and secondly, despite her tallness, her assurance, it served to inspire in male listeners a protective feeling.”

— Truman Capote

292. “If there’s one thing I loathe, it’s men who bite.”

— Truman Capote

293. “His voice with its Cuban accent was soft and sweet as a banana.”

— Truman Capote

294. “Tan grande es la ridiculez del mundo que no podemos decir o expresar nuestra ternura.”

— Truman Capote

295. “Stairs. Gray halls. Nye sniffed the odors, separating one from another: lavatory disinfectant, alcohol, dead cigars. Beyond.”

— Truman Capote

296. “Darling,” she instructed me, “would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn’t read this sort of thing without her lipstick.”

— Truman Capote

297. “The trouble with all these far-right and far-left mentalities is that they can encompass only one side of an argument and are congenitally incapable of holding two opinions in their heads at the same time.”

— Truman Capote

298. “Here he was in little Olathe, Kansas. Kind of funny, if you thought about it; imagine being back in Kansas, when only four months ago he had sworn, first to the State Parole Board, then to himself, that he would never set foot within its boundaries again. Well, it wasn’t for long.”

— Truman Capote

299. “Thackeray’s a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was an extremely good writer and Willa Cather was a great artist.”

— Truman Capote

300. “Preacher was a small man, a mite, and his face was a million wrinkles. Tufts of gray wool sprouted from his bluish skull and his eyes were sorrowful. He was so bent that he resembled a rusty sickle and his skin was the yellow of superior leather. As he studied what remained of his farm, his hand pestered his chin wisely but, to tell the truth, he was thinking nothing.”

— Truman Capote