The Best Truman Capote quotes

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

That isn’t writing at all, it’s typing. — Truman Capote

Good writing is rewriting. — Truman Capote

I like to talk on TV about those things that aren’t worth writing about. — Truman Capote

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. — Truman Capote

When I’m writing, I never write more than four hours a day. — Truman Capote

When I am writing, I try to do it five hours a day but I spend about two of those just fooling around. — Truman Capote

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

I always felt that nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that’s why I started writing. At least on paper I could put down what I thought. — Truman Capote

Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down. — Truman Capote

When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium. — Truman Capote

One of the most difficult things in writing a novel or anything at all is to choose the point of view from which it’s going to be told. — Truman Capote

Writing in the first person automatically gives you a point of view. — Truman Capote

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

All literature is gossip. — Truman Capote

I’ve been working, working, working, and you know, sometimes you look back at your work and you see that it just isn’t any good. — Truman Capote

The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. His work means nothing, otherwise. It has no meaning. — Truman Capote

A work of art is one of mystery, the one extreme magic; everything else is either arithmetic or biology. — Truman Capote

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

Work is the only device I know of. — Truman Capote

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. — Truman Capote

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. — Truman Capote

I will say only that all a writer has to work with is the material he has gathered as the result of his own endeavor and observations, and he cannot be denied the right to use it. Condemn, but not deny. — Truman Capote

Actually, I think friendship and love are exactly the same thing. — Truman Capote

You’re wonderful. Unique. I love you. — Truman Capote

It is very seldom that a person loves anyone they cannot in some way envy. — Truman Capote

Love, having no geography, knows no boundaries. — Truman Capote

Love should be allowed. I’m all for it. Now that I’ve got a pretty good idea what it is. — Truman Capote

I told you: you can make yourself love anybody. — Truman Capote

Never love a wild thing…If you let yourself love a wild thing. You’ll end up looking at the sky. — Truman Capote

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. — Truman Capote

If you sweep a house, and tend its fires and fill its stove, and there is love in you all the years you are doing this, then you and that house are married, that house is yours. — 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

I’ve never been a teacher in my life. — Truman Capote

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

Life is difficult enough without Meryl Streep movies. — Truman Capote

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

Love is a chain of love as nature is a chain of life. — Truman Capote

Gasping for breath, the body still battling for life. — Truman Capote

I never had a rejection slip in my life. — Truman Capote

It’s worth your life to order an omelette in most restaurants. You never know what you’re going to get. — Truman Capote

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

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. — Truman Capote

Are the dead as lonesome as the living? — Truman Capote

I thought of the future, and spoke of the past. — Truman Capote

Ever since I was a child, folks have thought they had me pegged, because of the way I am, the way I talk. And they’re always wrong. — Truman Capote

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

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

To wake up one morning and feel that I was a last a grown–up person, emptied of resentment, vengeful thoughts and other wasteful childish emotions. To find myself, in other words, an adult. Truman Capote — Truman Capote

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

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. — Truman Capote

There is such an animal as a nonstylist, only they’re not writers–they’re typists. — Truman Capote

I don’t use a typewriter, I write longhand, with a pencil. Essentially I’m a horizontal writer. I think better when I’m lying down. — Truman Capote

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

Are there any writers on the literary scene whom I consider truly great? Yes: Truman Capote. — Truman Capote

Intelligence alone can’t make a good writer and style alone can’t make a good writer–that is, not a really important or significant writer–but the two things together make a really good writer. — Truman Capote

That’s all a writer has to write about–what he sees and hears and what not. — Truman Capote

If you happen to capture my imagination for some reason and I decide to write about you and you don’t like what I wrote about you, which is entirely possible, then yes, I’m a dangerous writer. — Truman Capote

Of course, at their best, movies are anti–literature and, as a medium, belong not to writers, not to actors, but to directors. — Truman Capote

Nancy Clutter is always in a hurry, but she always has time. And that’s one definition of a lady. — Truman Capote

Clocks indeed must have their sacrifice: what is death but an offering to time and eternity? — Truman Capote

I’ve never had an affair with somebody who wasn’t at the same time a very good friend of mine, if you see what I mean. — Truman Capote

Friendship is a pretty full–time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody. You can’t have too many friends because then you’re just not really friends. — Truman Capote

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. — Truman Capote

You don’t understand. You’ve never hated anybody. No, I never have. We’re allotted just so much time on earth, and I wouldn’t want the Lord to see me wasting mine in any such manner. — Truman Capote

I just live one day at a time. That’s my new theory in life. — Truman Capote

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. — Truman Capote

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

I’ll never get used to anything. Anybody that does they might as well be dead. — Truman Capote

But it’s Sunday, Mr. Bell. Clocks are slow on Sundays. — Truman Capote

I belIeve more In the scIssors than I do In the pencIl. — Truman Capote

I’ve tried to believe, but I don’t, I can’t, and there’s no use pretending. — Truman Capote

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

It is the want to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something. — Truman Capote

Y]outh is hardly human: it can’t be, for the young never believe they will die…especially would they never believe that death comes, and often, in forms other than the natural one. — Truman Capote

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

With one exception everybody who has ever been involved with me is still a great friend of mine. — Truman Capote

You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who’s a friend. — Truman Capote

Most people who become suddenly famous overnight will find that they lose practically eighty percent of their friends. Your old friends just can’t stand it for some reason. — Truman Capote

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. — Truman Capote

The most dangerous thing in the world is to make a friend of an Englishman, because he’ll come sleep in your closet rather than spend 10 shillings on a hotel. — Truman Capote

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