Top 400 Truman Capote Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “Joel gazed down on the jumbled green, trying to picture the music room and the dancers... but the willows were willows and the goldenrod goldenrod and the dancers dead and lost.”

— Truman Capote

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “She is still a child.”

— Truman Capote

358. “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

359. “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

360. “Mr. Belli had several vanities: for example, he thought he was saner than other people; also, he believed himself to be a walking compass; his digestion, and an ability to read upside down, were other ego-enlarging items. But his reflection in a mirror aroused little inner applause; not that he disliked his appearance; he just knew that it was very so-what.”

— Truman Capote

361. “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

362. “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

363. “Is it because my friend is shy with everyone except strangers that these strangers, and merest acquaintances, seem to us our truest friends?”

— Truman Capote

364. “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

365. “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

366. “Her smile was fragmentary, it clung to her lips like cake crumbs.”

— Truman Capote

367. “Mille tendresse.”

— Truman Capote

368. “I can’t accept overnight what I’ve always denied.”

— Truman Capote

369. “You know what’s going to happen to you?” she said, with no hint of a stutter. “I’m going to march you over to the zoo and feed you to the yak.”

— Truman Capote

370. “Four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives.”

— Truman Capote

371. “We are speaking of love. A leaf, a handful of seed – begin with these, learn a little what it is to love. First a leaf, a fall of rain, then someone to receive what a leaf has taught you, what a fall of rain has ripened. No easy process, understand; it could take a lifetime, it has mine, and still I’ve never mastered it – I only know how true it is; that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life.”

— Truman Capote

372. “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

373. “I waited until ten past six, then made myself delay five minutes more.”

— Truman Capote

374. “Holly had married him: well, well. I wished I were under the wheels of the train.”

— Truman Capote

375. “Far from resenting these lessons, the pupil, to please his tutor, once composed a sheaf of poems, and though the verses were very obscene, Perry, who thought them nevertheless hilarious, had had the manuscript leather-bound in a prison shop and its title, Dirty Jokes, stamped in gold.”

— Truman Capote

376. “Really, though, I toted up the other night, and I’ve only had eleven lovers – not counting anything that happened before I was thirteen because, after all, that just doesn’t count.”

— Truman Capote

377. “La idea de someterme a otra forma de vida disciplinada me desesperaba.”

— Truman Capote

378. “I have a fair chance they won’t catch me. Provided you keep your bouche fermez.”

— Truman Capote

379. “Dar e duminica, domnule Bell. Ceasurile raman in urma duminica. Si apoi, nici nu m-am culcat inca, ii spuse ea si apoi ii marturisi: Vreau sa spun – nu ca sa dorm.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

382. “The inhabitants of the village, numbering two hundred and seventy, were satisfied that this should be so, quite content to exist inside ordinary life – to work, to hunt, to watch television, to attend school socials, choir practice, meetings of the 4-H Club.”

— Truman Capote

383. “However, even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably, first in the state courts, then through the Federal courts until the ultimate tribunal is reached – the United States Supreme Court.”

— Truman Capote

384. “What I’ve found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany’s. It calms me down right away, teh quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their suites, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany’s, then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name.”

— Truman Capote

385. “She was seventy-four years old, but in Nye’s opinion, “looked younger – maybe ten minutes younger.”

— Truman Capote

386. “But the hands of bidders flickered shyly – work-roughened hands timid of parting with hard-earned cash;.”

— Truman Capote

387. “Excitement – a variety of creative coma – overcame me.”

— Truman Capote

388. “If you walk a singular path, you always carry a certain grief.”

— Truman Capote

389. “And turning in space, her hair swung like a victory. They danced until all at once and as one the music dimmed and the stars went dark.”

— Truman Capote

390. “I noticed a taxi stop across the street to let out a girl who ran up the steps of the Forty-second Street public library. She was through the doors before I recognized her, which was pardonable, for Holly and libraries were not an easy association to make.”

— Truman Capote

391. “It was drowning in the earth, this house, and they, all of them, were submerging with it.”

— Truman Capote

392. “E plicticos, dar raspunsul e ca lucrurile bune nu ti se intampla decat daca esti si tu bun.”

— Truman Capote

393. “He lost her to a quadrille of partners who gobbled up her stammered jokes like popcorn tossed to pigeons.”

— Truman Capote

394. “Graham Greene was a first-class writer. Until the Vatican grabbed him.”

— Truman Capote

395. “You had to believe it, because it was really true.”

— Truman Capote

396. “Successful theft exhilarates.”

— Truman Capote

397. “He wants awfully to be inside staring out: anybody with their nose pressed against a glass is liable to look stupid.”

— Truman Capote

398. “Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is.” THE.”

— Truman Capote

399. “What’s the matter with you? Are trying to ruin the day? It’s a beautiful day: leave it alone!”

— Truman Capote

400. “I thought writers were quite old.”

— Truman Capote