Top 400 Truman Capote Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “She ought to be protected against herself.”

— Truman Capote

253. “Strong character, high courage, hard work – it seemed that none of these were determining factors in the fates of Tex John’s children. They shared a doom against which virtue was no defense.”

— Truman Capote

254. “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

255. “If we know the past, and live the present, it is possible that we dream the future?”

— Truman Capote

256. “When you’re grown up, will we still be friends?”

— Truman Capote

257. “She was forever on her way out...”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

261. “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

262. “The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.”

— Truman Capote

263. “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

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

— Truman Capote

265. “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

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

— Truman Capote

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Truman Capote

270. “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

271. “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

272. “You exist in a half-world suspended between two superstructures, one self-expression and the other self-destruction.”

— Truman Capote

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

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

— Truman Capote

285. “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

286. “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

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

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

291. “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

292. “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

293. “It all began in Harry’s Bar, as so many Venetian escapades do.”

— Truman Capote

294. “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

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

— Truman Capote

296. “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

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

— Truman Capote

298. “All children are morbid: it’s their one saving grace.”

— Truman Capote

299. “Vivimos en la oscuridad, hacemos lo que podemos, el resto es la demencia del arte.”

— Truman Capote

300. “At the door, Smith said to Hickock, “No chicken-hearted jurors, they!” They both laughed loudly, and a cameraman photographed them. The picture appeared in a Kansas paper above a caption entitled: “The Last Laugh?”

— Truman Capote