Truman Capote Quotes

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

You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.

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

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

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.

That isn't writing at all, it's typing.

If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there's no point in it. . . . for me, every act of art is the act of solving a mystery.

You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who's a friend.

He loved her, he loved her, and until he'd loved her she had never minded being alone....

Well, I'm about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy.

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

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.

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.

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

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.

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.

If you can hear time passing it makes the day last longer. I've come to appreciate a long day.

Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in.

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.

Yes: but aren't love and marriage notoriously synonymous in the minds of most women? Certainly very few men get the first without promising the second: love, that is-if it's just a matter of spreading her legs, almost any woman will do that for nothing.