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

352. “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

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

— Truman Capote

354. “Let me build you a drink.”

— 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. “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

357. “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

358. “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

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

— Truman Capote

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

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

— Truman Capote

369. “She is still a child.”

— Truman Capote

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

374. “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

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. “She played very well, and sometimes sang too. Sang in the hoarse, breaking tones of a boy’s adolescent voice.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

380. “Mille tendresse.”

— Truman Capote

381. “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

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

— Truman Capote

383. “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

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

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

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

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

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

392. “Successful theft exhilarates.”

— Truman Capote

393. “Adoro Nueva York.”

— Truman Capote

394. “I thought writers were quite old.”

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

396. “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

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

— Truman Capote

398. “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

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

— Truman Capote

400. “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