Truman Capote > Quotes

“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”
― 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

“It may be normal, darling; but I'd rather be natural.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's

“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

“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

“More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.”
― Truman Capote, Answered Prayers - The Unfinished Novel

“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

“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

“I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true.”
― Truman Capote

“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

“It’s better to look at the sky than live there”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's

“You can’t give your heart to a wild thing.”
― Truman Capote

“Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.”
― 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

“Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.”
― 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

“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

“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

“Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's

“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

“Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.”
― 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

“Leave it to me: I'm always top banana in the shock department.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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