Top 400 Truman Capote Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Miss Langman was often, in interviews, described as a witty conversationalist; how can a woman be witty when she hasn’t a sense of humor? – and she has none, which was her central flaw as a person and as an artist.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

303. “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. There wasn’t a suspicion of bone in his body; his face, a zero filled in with pretty miniature features, had an unused, a virginal quality: it was as if he’d been born, then expanded, his skin remaining unlined as a blown-up balloon, and his mouth, though ready for squalls and tantrums, a spoiled sweet puckering.”

— Truman Capote

304. “I knew Faulkner very well. He was a great friend of mine. Well, as much as you could be a friend of his, unless you were a fourteen-year-old nymphet. Then you could be a great friend!”

— Truman Capote

305. “What kind of things did you have in mind, kid?′ Clyde said this with a smile that exposed a slight lewdness: the young man who laughed at seals and bought balloons had reversed his profile, and the new side, which showed a harsher angle, was the one Grady was never able to defend herself against: its brashness so attracted, so crippled her, she was left desiring only to appease.”

— Truman Capote

306. “He had no thought of how it was before he came to the farm. His memory of those times was like a house where no one lives and the furniture has rotten away.”

— Truman Capote

307. “I’d rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Which isn’t being pious. Just practical.”

— Truman Capote

308. “The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person’s nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.”

— Truman Capote

309. “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

310. “As we grow older all is too explainable, the capacity to invent pleasurable alarm recedes: too bad, a pity – throughout our lives we ought to believe in ghost hotels.”

— Truman Capote

311. “Her power resided in her attitude: she behaved as though she believed she was irresistible; and whatever her opportunities may have been, the style of the woman implied an erotic history complete with footnotes.”

— Truman Capote

312. “I’ll own up: I think it is a dream, Miss Verena. But a man who doesn’t dream is like a man who doesn’t sweat: he stores up a lot of poison.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

314. “Giveya two-bits” cash for that ol tree.” Ordinarily my friend is afraid of saying no; but on this occasion she promptly shakes her head: “We wouldn’t take a dollar.” The mill owner’s wife persists. “A dollar, my foot! Fifty cents. That’s my last offer. Goodness, woman, you can get another one.” In answer, my friend gently reflects: “I doubt it. There’s never two of anything.”

— Truman Capote

315. “Although the journalists anticipated violence, several had predicted shouted abuse. But when the crowd caught sight of the murderers, with their escort of blue-coated highway patrolmen, it fell silent, as though amazed to find them humanly shaped.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

317. “Feeling wouldn’t run half so high if this had happened to anyone except the Clutters. Anyone less admired. Prosperous. Secure. But that family represented everything people hereabouts really value and respect, and that such a thing could happen to them – well, it’s like being told there is no God. It makes life seem pointless. I don’t think people are so much frightened as they are deeply depressed.”

— Truman Capote

318. “Whatever his reason, it can’t have been calculated. Which is why what you did was much worse: you planned to humiliate him. It was deliberate. Now listen to me, Buddy: there is only one unpardonable sin – deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven. That, never.”

— Truman Capote

319. “When Miss Bobbit saw them, two boys whose flower-masked faces were like yellow moons, she rushed down the steps, her arms outstretched.”

— Truman Capote

320. “But I know what I like.′ She smiled, and et the cat drop to the floor. ‘It’s like Tiffany’s,‘she said. ‘Not that I give a hoot about jewellery. Diamonds, yes. But it’s tacky to wear diamonds before you’re forty; and even that’s risky.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

322. “I have my family to protect, and my name, and I am a coward where those institutions enter.”

— Truman Capote

323. “The pheasant season in Kansas, a famed November event, lures hordes of sportsmen from adjoining states, and during the past week plaid-hatted regiments had paraded across the autumnal expanses, flushing and felling with rounds of birdshot great coppery flights of the grain-fattened birds.”

— Truman Capote

324. “Of course, I failed in several of the areas I invaded, but it is true that one learns more from a failure than one does from a success.”

— Truman Capote

325. “And unless one can observe the guilt and regret of the mourners, surely there is nothing satisfactory about being dead?”

— Truman Capote

326. “And suppose you don’t like it? Excellent question; and, strangely, one I’d never asked myself, principally because I had chosen the ingredients, and I always have faith in my own judgment.”

— Truman Capote

327. “My acquaintances are many, my friends are few; those who really know me fewer still.”

— Truman Capote

328. “No one lingered, neither the press corps nor any of the towns people. Warm rooms and warm suppers beckoned them, and as they hurried away, leaving the cold square to the two gray cats, the miraculous autumn departed too; the year’s first snow began to fall.”

— Truman Capote

329. “Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans – in fact, few Kansans – had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.”

— Truman Capote

330. “By scraps and bits I’ve in the past surrendered myself to strangers – men who disappeared down the gangplank, got off at the next station: put together, maybe they would’ve made the one person in the world – but there he is with a dozen different faces moving down a hundred separate streets.”

— Truman Capote

331. “Another little girl brought a baked chicken, presumably to be eaten on the bus; the only trouble was she’d forgotten to take out the insides before cooking it. Miss Bobbit’s mother said that was all right by her, chicken was chicken; which is memorable because it is the single opinion she ever voiced.”

— Truman Capote

332. “She was still on the stairs, now she reached the landing, and the ragbag colors of her boy’s hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino-blond and yellow, caught the hall light. It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker. For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks.”

— Truman Capote

333. “At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them – four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives. But afterward the townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy re-creating them over and again – those somber explosions that stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many old neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as strangers.”

— Truman Capote

334. “I’m not a cold plate of m-m-macaroni. I’m a warm-hearted person. It’s the basis of my character.”

— Truman Capote

335. “Who needs money anyhow? Leastwise, not right aways we don’t... except for dopes. We ought to save enough so we can have a dope every day cause my brains get fried if I can’t have myself an ice-cold dope. And cigarettes. I surely do appreciate a smoke. Dopes and smokes and Henry are the only things I love.” “You like me some, don’t you?” he said, without meaning really to speak aloud. In any case, Idabel... did not answer.”

— Truman Capote

336. “But it took us a year to smooth out that accent. How we did it finally, we gave her French lessons: after she could imitate French, it wasn’t so long she could imitate English. We.”

— Truman Capote

337. “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

338. “Let me build you a drink.”

— Truman Capote

339. “And when that happens, I know it. A message saying so merely confirms a piece of news some secret vein had already received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose like a kite on a broken string. That is why, walking across a school campus on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying towards heaven.”

— Truman Capote

340. “She is still a child.”

— Truman Capote

341. “In the night his hand sometimes searches it out, and his fingers drift across the strings: then, the world.”

— Truman Capote

342. “It is almost impossible for a man who enjoys freedom with all its prerogatives, to realize what it means to be deprived of that freedom.”

— Truman Capote

343. “He looked as lonely and innapropriate as a seagull in a wheat field.”

— Truman Capote

344. “Cuatro sillas y una mesa. En la mesa, papel; en las sillas, hombres. Ventanas a la calle. En la calle, gente; contra las ventanas, lluvia.”

— Truman Capote

345. “How was it possible that such effort, such plain virtue, could overnight be reduced to this – smoke, thinning as it rose and was received by the big, annihilating sky?”

— Truman Capote

346. “As is customary, the warden, having finished his recitation, asked the condemned man whether he had any last statement to make. Hickock nodded. “I just want to say I hold no hard feelings. You people are sending me to a better world than this ever was”;.”

— Truman Capote

347. “The Rupp family were Roman Catholics, the Clutters, Methodist – a fact that should in itself be sufficient to terminate whatever fancies she and this boy might have of some day marrying.”

— Truman Capote

348. “He stood there whispering the names of the evening stars as they opened in flower above him. The stars were his pleasure, but tonight they did not comfort him: they did not make him remember that what happens to us on earth is lost in the endless shine of eternity.”

— Truman Capote

349. “Listen, you can throw me out if you want to. I’ve got a gall barging in on you like this.”

— Truman Capote

350. “After all, it was “painful” to imagine that one might be “not just right” – particularly if what was wrong was not your fault but “maybe a thing you were born with.”

— Truman Capote