Truman Capote Quotes

My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.

But I'm not a saint yet. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius.

It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.

Shoot, boy, the country's just fulla folks what knows everything, and don't understand nothing, just fullofem.

It takes a lot of bad writing to get to a little good writing.

I'll pay you a million dollars if you tell your life story for true.

we don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am I.

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.

Technically I feel total fluidity in writing. I feel there's nothing technically that I can't do the way a certain sort of pianist feels that. But that doesn't mean it comes easily. It doesn't.

Wrinkles and bones, white hair and diamonds: I can't wait.

There is no shame — having a dirty face — the shame comes when you keep it dirty.

Leave it to me: I'm always top banana in the shock department.

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.

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.

She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox.

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.

Any work of art, provided it springs from a sincere motivation to further understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love.

Those fellows, they're always crying over killers. Never a thought for the victims.

there is only one unpardonable sin--deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven.

I remember things the way they should have been.

Really being friends is the most important part, I think, of any relationship.

Most secrets should never be told, but especially those that are more menacing to the listener than to the teller.

How do I look so young? Quite simple: a complete vegetable diet, 12 hours sleep a night, and lots and lots of make-up.

The enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have.

Traveling wears me out.

Half the people who snuff people, that's what they want: recognition. Get their picture in the paper.

Every day is a new day with me. All holds are off. All contracts are forgotten.

Whatever relationship you have, man or woman, you have to be very attentive and you have to be a very good friend to them regardless of what they do.

Time. Time. What is time? Swiss manufacture it, French hoard it, Italians squander it, Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Know what I say? I say time is a crook.

There's lots of things you don't know. All kinds of strange things . . . mostly they happened before we were born: that makes them seem to me so much more real.

Talent is a valued tormentor.

I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon.

All artists are two-headed calves.

Never demean yourself by talking back to a critic, never. Write those letters to the editor in your head, but don't put them on paper.

I told you: you can make yourself love anybody.

The more you know about something, the harder it becomes. You become more and more of a perfectionist. I think it's a curse... It's a form of illness!

I'm sure Proust was a big bore.

I used to spend all of my time projecting. I was never in the moment. It was always tomorrow or next week or two months from now. That was one of the reasons I always had this sense of anxiety.

I think my greatest talent really is for friendship.

If you can't be friends with a lover, then forget it. It's not going to work.

I also write the last paragraph or page of a story first. That way I always know what I'm working towards.

I think I would have written five times as much as I've written if I didn't have this terrible sense of perfection.

I'm one of the world's greatest pencil sharpeners.

I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.

I've got something inside of me, peasantlike and stubborn, and I'm in it till the end of the race.

She had only one flaw. She was perfect, otherwise whe was perfect.

Sicily is more beautiful than any woman.

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.

I know the next best thing is often the very best.

In California everyone goes to a therapist, is a therapist, or is a therapist going to a therapist.