Capote Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Capote. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.
Truman Capote
It may be normal, darling; but I'd rather be natural.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
I don't want to own anything until I find a place where me and things go together.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories)
Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
The answer is good things only happen to you if you're good. Good? Honest is more what I mean... Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.
Truman Capote (In Cold Blood)
More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.
Truman Capote (Answered Prayers)
It’s better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
Home is where you feel at home. I'm still looking.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who's a friend.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.
Truman Capote
I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.
Truman Capote
He loved her, he loved her, and until he'd loved her she had never minded being alone....
Truman Capote (Summer Crossing)
But I'm not a saint yet. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius.
Truman Capote (Music for Chameleons)
You can’t give your heart to a wild thing.
Truman Capote
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." "She's drunk," Joe Bell informed me. "Moderately," Holly confessed....Holly lifted her martini. "Let's wish the Doc luck, too," she said, touching her glass against mine. "Good luck: and believe me, dearest Doc -- it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
Never love a wild thing...If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make.
Truman Capote (Truman Capote: Conversations (Literary Conversations Series))
Everybody has to feel superior to somebody," she said. "But it's customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true.
Truman Capote
Don't wanna sleep, don't wanna die, just wanna go a-travellin' through the pastures of the sky
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
I told you: you can make yourself love anybody.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
It is no shame to have a dirty face- the shame comes when you keep it dirty.
Truman Capote (In Cold Blood)
Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.
Truman Capote
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 (Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories)
Did you ever, in that wonderland wilderness of adolesence [sic] ever, quite unexpectedly, see something, a dusk sky, a wild bird, a landscape, so exquisite terror touched you at the bone? And you are afraid, terribly afraid the smallest movement, a leaf, say, turning in the wind, will shatter all? That is, I think, the way love is, or should be: one lives in beautiful terror.
Truman Capote
You know the days when you get the mean reds? Paul Varjak: The mean reds. You mean like the blues? Holly Golightly: No. The blues are because you’re getting fat, and maybe it’s been raining too long. You’re just sad, that’s all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid, and you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
we don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am I.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
I loved her enough to forget myself, my self pitying despairs, and be content that something she thought happy was going to happen.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
Good luck and believe me, dearest Doc - it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in.
Truman Capote (In Cold Blood)
I'm very scared, Buster. Yes, at last. Because it could go on forever. Not knowing what's yours until you've thrown it away.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories)
Leave it to me: I'm always top banana in the shock department.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany's)
As long as you live, there's always something waiting; and even if it's bad, and you know it's bad, what can you do? You can't stop living.
Truman Capote (In Cold Blood)
You’re wrong. She is a phony. But on the other hand you’re right. She isn’t a phony because she’s a real phony. She believes all this crap she believes. You can’t talk her out of it.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
Reading dreams. That's what started her walking down the road. Every day she'd walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day she just kept on.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
It should take you about four seconds to walk from here to the door. I'll give you two.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.
Truman Capote
I'll never get used to anything. Anybody that does they might as well be dead.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
You're wonderful. Unique. I love you.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity.
Truman Capote (In Cold Blood)
But it's Sunday, Mr. Bell. Clocks are slow on Sundays.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
Love should be allowed. I’m all for it. Now that I’ve got a pretty good idea what it is.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
there is only one unpardonable sin--deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven.
Truman Capote (The Thanksgiving Visitor)
Maybe the older you grow and the less easy it is to put thought into action, maybe that’s why it gets all locked up in your head and becomes a burden.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
There are certain shades of limelight that can wreck a girl's complexion.
Truman Capote
I thought that Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment that I cut his throat.
Truman Capote (In Cold Blood)
What I found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany's. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it;nothing very bad could happen to you there.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories)
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 (Other Voices, Other Rooms)
I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.
Truman Capote
Well, I'm about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy.
Truman Capote
The wind is us-- it gathers and remembers all our voices, then sends them talking and telling through the leaves and the fields.
Truman Capote
Wrinkles and bones, white hair and diamonds: I can't wait.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportian suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lovers's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favourite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.
Truman Capote (Other Voices, Other Rooms)
It's bad enough in life to do without something YOU want; but confound it, what gets my goat is not being able to give somebody something you want THEM to have.
Truman Capote (A Christmas Memory)
Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools.
Truman Capote
All literature is gossip
Truman Capote
[L]ove, having no geography, knows no boundaries.
Truman Capote
It is easy to ignore the rain if you have a raincoat
Truman Capote (In Cold Blood)
She had only one flaw. She was perfect, otherwise she was perfect.
Truman Capote
Of many magics, one is watching a beloved sleep: free of eyes and awareness, you for a sweet moment hold the heart of him; helpless, he is then all, and however irrationally, you have trusted him to be, man-pure, child-tender.
Truman Capote (Summer Crossing)
There were hints of sunrise on the rim of the sky, yet it was still dark, and the traces of morning color were like goldfish swimming in ink.
Truman Capote (The Muses Are Heard)
Oh, I adore to cook. It makes me feel so mindless in a worthwhile way.
Truman Capote (Summer Crossing)
But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world's ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.
Truman Capote (Other Voices, Other Rooms)
I despise people who can't control themselves.
Truman Capote (In Cold Blood)
I don't mean I'd mind being rich and famous. That's very much on my schedule, and someday I'll try to get around to it; but if it happens, I'd like to have my ego tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
Have you never heard what the wise man say : all of the future exists in the past.
Truman Capote (Other Voices, Other Rooms)
A disquieting loneliness came into my life, but it induced no hunger for friends of longer acquaintance: they seemed now like a salt-free, sugarless diet.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
our real fears are the sounds of footsteps walking in the corridors of our minds, and the anxieties, the phantom floatings, they create.
Truman Capote
Most of life is so dull it is not worth discussing, and it is dull at all ages. When we change our brand of cigarette, move to a new neighborhood, subscribe to a different newspaper, fall in and out of love, we are protesting in ways both frivolous and deep against the not to be diluted dullness of day-to-day living.
Truman Capote (Summer Crossing)
She was still hugging the cat. "Poor slob," she said, tickling his head, "poor slob without a name. It's a little inconvenient, his not having a name. But I haven't any right to give him one: he'll have to wait until he belongs to somebody. We just sort of took up by the river one day, we don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am I. I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together. I'm not quite sure where that is just yet. But I know what it's like." She smiled, and let the cat drop to the floor. "It's like Tiffany's," she said. [...] It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, 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 (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.
Truman Capote
You don't run out on people; you run out on yourself.
Truman Capote (Summer Crossing)
There's so few things men can talk about. If a man doesn't like baseball, then he must like horses, and if he doesn't like either of them, well, I'm in trouble anyway: he don't like girls.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
Still, when all is said, somewhere one must belong: even the soaring falcon returns to its master's wrist.
Truman Capote (Summer Crossing)
I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany´s.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
I've tried to believe, but I don't, I can't, and there's no use pretending.
Truman Capote (In Cold Blood)
I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together. I'm not quite sure where that is just yet. But I know what it's like.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
Are the dead as lonesome as the living?
Truman Capote (Other Voices, Other Rooms)
Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who ... clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecouchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.
Roberto Bolaño (2666)
Oh Jesus God we did belong to each other. He was mine.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
There’s got to be something wrong with us. To do what we did.
Truman Capote (In Cold Blood)
The blues are because you're getting fat or maybe it's been raining too long. You're sad, that's all. But the mean reds are horrible. You're afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don't know what you're afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don't know what it is.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
Once a thing is set to happen, all you can do is hope it won't. Or will-depending. As long as you live, there’s always something waiting, and even if it’s bad, and you know it's bad, what can you do? You can’t stop living.
Truman Capote (In Cold Blood)
...of all things this was the saddest, that life goes on: if one leaves one's lover, life should stop for him, and if one disappears from the world, then the world should stop, too: and it never did. And that was the real reason for most people getting up in the morning: not because it would matter but because it wouldn't.
Truman Capote (The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories)
What we want most is to be held...and told..that everything (everything is a funny thing, is baby milk and papa's eyes, is roaring logs on a cold morning, is hoot owls and the boy who makes you cry after school, is mama's long hair, is being afraid and twisted faces on the bedroom wall)...is going to be alright.
Truman Capote
El libro es capote de torero, paraguas para el sol y la lluvia, escudo contra las flechas de la estulticia, de la imbecilidad que inunda el cielo. El libro es almohada para tener los mejores sueños, cama de clavos para tener las más chidas pesadillas, el libro es pañuelo de lágrimas, bálsamo para las heridas, el libro es este ladrillo que construye ciudadanía, casas, muros, universos. Somos lo que hemos leído por el contrario seremos la ausencia que los libros dejaron en nuestras vidas. Leer es resistir. Leer es encontrarte a ti mismo y saber que sigues siendo humano.
Benito Taibo
Never love a wild thing... 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... . If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
The average personality reshapes frequently, every few years even our bodies undergo a complete overhaul - desirable or not, it is a natural thing that we should change. All right, here were two people who never would change. That is what Mildred Grossman had in common with Holly Golightly. They would never change because they'd been given their character too soon; which, like sudden riches, leads to a lack of proportion: the one had splurged herself into a top-heavy realist, the other a lopsided romantic.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
I’ve tried that. I’ve tried aspirin, too. Rusty thinks I should smoke marijuana, and I did for a while, but it only makes me giggle. 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, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, 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 (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
Those final weeks, spanning end of summer and the beginning of another autumn, are blurred in memory, perhaps because our understanding of each other had reached that sweet depth where two people communicate more often in silence than in words: an affectionate quietness replaces the tensions, the unrelaxed chatter and chasing about that produce a friendship’s more showy, more, in the surface sense, dramatic moments.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurerance of our identities? I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was so egotist...he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the beautiful comrade, the only inseparatable love...poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point.
Truman Capote (Other Voices, Other Rooms)
It's a bore, but the answer is good things only happen to you if you're good. Good? Honest is more what I mean. Not lawtype honest--I'd rob a grave, I'd steal two-bits off a dead man's eyes if I thought it would contribute to the day's enjoyment--but unto-thyself-type honest. Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Which isn't being pious. Just practical. Cancer may cool you, but the other's sure to.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories)
You are a man of extreme passion, a hungry man not quite sure where his appetite lies, a deeply frustrated man striving to project his individuality against a backdrop of rigid conformity. You exist in a half-world suspended between two superstructures, one self-expression and the other self-destruction. You are strong, but there is a flaw in your strength, and unless you learn to control it the flaw will prove stronger than your strength and defeat you. The flaw? Explosive emotional reaction out of all proportion to the occasion. Why? Why this unreasonable anger at the sight of others who are happy or content, this growing contempt for people and the desire to hurt them? All right, you think they're fools, you despise them because their morals, their happiness is the source of your frustration and resentment. But these are dreadful enemies you carry within yourself--in time destructive as bullets. Mercifully, a bullet kills its victim. This other bacteria, permitted to age, does not kill a man but leaves in its wake the hulk of a creature torn and twisted; there is still fire within his being but it is kept alive by casting upon it faggots of scorn and hate. He may successfully accumulate, but he does not accumulate success, for he is his own enemy and is kept from truly enjoying his achievements.
Truman Capote (In Cold Blood)
I knew damn well I would never be a movie star. It's too hard; and if you are intelligent, it's too embarrassing. My complexes aren't inferior enough: being a movie star and having a big fat ego are supposed to go hand-in-hand; actually, it's essential not to have any ego at all. I don't mean I'd mind being rich and famous. That's very much on my schedule, and someday I'll try and get around to it; but if it happens, I'd like to have my ego, tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's.
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories)
You cold or something?' he said. She strained against him; she wanted to pass clear through him: 'It's a chill, it's nothing'; and then, pushing a little away: 'Say you love me.' I said it.' No, oh no. You haven't. I was listening. And you never do.' Well, give me time.' Please.' He sat up and glanced at a clock across the room. It was after five. Then decisively he pulled off his windbreaker and began to unlace his shoes. Aren't you going to, Clyde?' He grinned back at her. 'Yeah, I'm going to.' I don't mean that; and what's more, I don't like it: you sound as though you were talking to a whore.' Come off it, honey. You didn't drag me up here to tell you about love.' You disgust me,' she said. Listen to her! She's sore!' A silence followed that circulated like an aggrieved bird. Clyde said, 'You want to hit me, huh? I kind of like you when you're sore: that's the kind of girl you are,' which made Grady light in his arms when he lifted and kissed her. 'You still want me to say it?' Her head slumped on his shoulder. 'Because I will,' he said, fooling his fingers in her hair. 'Take off your clothes--and I'll tell it to you good.
Truman Capote (Summer Crossing)
You know those days when you've got the means reds?’ ‘Same as the blues?’ ‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘No, the blues are because you’re getting fat or maybe it’s been raining too long. You’re sad that’s all. But the mean reds are horrible. You’re afraid, and you sweat like hell, but you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don’t know what it is. You’ve had that feeling?’ ‘Quite often. Some people call it angst.’ ‘All right. Angst. But what do you do about it?’ ‘Well, a drink helps.’ ‘I’ve tried that. I’ve tried aspirin, too. Rusty thinks I should smoke marijuana, and I did for a while, but it only makes me giggle. What I’ve found does the most good is to just get into a taxi and go to Tiffany’s. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, 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 (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)