Top 400 Truman Capote Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “My acquaintances are many, my friends are few; those who really know me fewer still.”

— Truman Capote

302. “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

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

— Truman Capote

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

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

— Truman Capote

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

315. “But mostly, I wanted to tell about her cat. I had kept my promise; I had found him. It took weeks of after-work roaming through those Spanish Harlem streets... he was seated in the window of a warm-looking room: I wondered what his name was, for I was certain he had one now, certain he’d arrived somewhere he belonged. African hut or whatever, I hope Holly has, too.”

— Truman Capote

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

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

— Truman Capote

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

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

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

326. “Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell,’ Holly advised him. ‘That was Doc’s mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. 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

327. “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

328. “He had merely fallen face down across the bed, as though sleep were a weapon that had struck him from behind.”

— Truman Capote

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “I don’t want to own anything until I find a place where me and things go together. I’m not sure where that is but I know what it is like.”

— Truman Capote

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “And so, along paths bordered by tender regard, by total fidelity, they began to go their semiseparate ways – his a public route, a march of satisfying conquests, and hers a private one that eventually wound through hospital corridors.”

— Truman Capote

341. “What a terrible thing when neighbors can’t look at each other without kind of wondering!”

— Truman Capote

342. “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

343. “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

344. “Let me build you a drink.”

— Truman Capote

345. “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

346. “She is still a child.”

— Truman Capote

347. “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

348. “Brazil! That’s where they’re building a whole new capital city. Right from scratch. Imagine getting in on the ground floor of something like that! Any fool could make a fortune.”

— Truman Capote

349. “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

350. “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