"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."
— Truman Capote

"More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones."
— Truman Capote (Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel)

"'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.'"
— 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

"There are certain shades of limelight that can wreck a girl's complexion."
— Truman Capote

"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

"Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor."
— Truman Capote

"Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act."
— 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

"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: A Short Novel and Three Stories)

"Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools."
— Truman Capote

"'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: A Novel)

"It may be normal, darling; but I'd rather be natural."
— Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany's)

"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)

"[L]ove, having no geography, knows no boundaries."
— 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)

"I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true."
— 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 (Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories)

"He loved her, he loved her, and until he'd loved her she had never minded being alone...."
— Truman Capote (Summer Crossing: A Novel)

"Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it."
— Truman Capote

"All literature is gossip"
— Truman Capote

"Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor."
— Truman Capote

"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 proporlian suspect, pity; and still fewer know that hapiness 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 lilac 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)

"Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring."
— Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany's)

"It's redundant to die in Los Angeles."
— Truman Capote

"Well, I'm about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy."
— Truman Capote

"I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil."
— 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)

"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 dishonet heart. "
— Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany's)

"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)

"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 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)

"Still, when all is said, somewhere one must belong: even the soaring falcon returns to its master's wrist."
— Truman Capote (Summer Crossing: A Novel)

"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 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)

"It’s better to look at the sky than live there"
— Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany's)

"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)

"think of nothing things
think of wind"
— Truman Capote

"[F]or us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laugther; and with the garbage of liveliness stuffed down us untill 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)

"To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make."
— Truman Capote

"You can't blame a writer for what the characters say."
— Truman Capote

"I despise people who can't control themselves."
— Truman Capote (In Cold Blood)

"Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor."
— Truman Capote

"I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods."
— Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany's)

"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

"'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)

"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

"...all his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved."
— Truman Capote

"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)

"A beautiful day with the buoyancy of a bird."
— Truman Capote