Top 400 Truman Capote Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Listen, you can throw me out if you want to. I’ve got a gall barging in on you like this.”

— Truman Capote

352. “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

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

— Truman Capote

354. “So I say the sane thing to do is shut up. You live until you die, and it doesn’t matter how you go; dead’s dead.”

— Truman Capote

355. “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

356. “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

357. “Autumns reward western Kansas for the evils that the remaining seasons impose: winter’s rough Colorado winds and hp-high, sheep-slaughtering snows; the slushes and the strange land fogs of spring; and summer, when even crows seek the puny shade, and the tawny infinitude of wheat stalks bristle, blaze.”

— Truman Capote

358. “How silly, my dear; don’t you know that if I came here as a child, then most of me never left?”

— Truman Capote

359. “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

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

— Truman Capote

361. “Mille tendresse.”

— Truman Capote

362. “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

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

— Truman Capote

364. “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

365. “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

366. “The stifling room was musty; it smelled of old furniture and the burned out fires of wintertime...”

— Truman Capote

367. “E mai bine sa te uiti la cer decat sa traiesti acolo. Un loc atat de singuratic; atat de nelamurit. Doar un tinut unde se ivesc trasnete si unde totul dispare.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

374. “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

375. “I thought writers were quite old.”

— Truman Capote

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

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

— Truman Capote

380. “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

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

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

384. “Susan, summarizing the problem from Nancy’s viewpoint, had once said, “You love Bobby now, and you need him. But deep down even Bobby knows there isn’t any future in it. Later.”

— Truman Capote

385. “Ottilie was used to boldly smiling at men; but now her smile was fragmentary, it clung to her lips like cake crumbs.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

387. “Successful theft exhilarates.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

389. “It’s a bore, but the answer is good things only happen to you if you’re good.”

— Truman Capote

390. “Adoro Nueva York.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

392. “Never mind, all difficult music must be heard more than once. And if what I tell you now sounds senseless, it will in retrospect seem far too clear; and when this happens, when those flowers in your eyes wither, irrecoverable as they are, why, though no tears helped dissolve my own cocoon, I shall weep a little for you.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

396. “No one comprehended that really he was ill, that grief had made him so, that grief had drawn a circle around him he could not escape from and others could not enter.”

— Truman Capote

397. “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

398. “It was not, however, an atmosphere she would have chosen for herself – the airless inescapable pressures of intimacy with others would have withered her soon enough – her system required the cold, exclusive climate of the individual.”

— Truman Capote

399. “Kay yawned and rested her forehead against the windowpane, her fingers idly strumming the guitar: the strings sang a hollow, lulling tune, as monotonously soothing as the Southern landscape, smudged in darkness, flowing past the window. An icy winter moon rolled above the train across the night sky like a thin white wheel.”

— Truman Capote

400. “The fine lawn surrounding.”

— Truman Capote