Truman Capote Quotes - Page 12

I feel that all a writer has is his own experience.

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

Brazil was beastly but Buenos Aires the best. Not Tiffany's, but almost.

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.

It snowed all week. Wheels and footsteps moved soundlessly on the street, as if the business of living continued secretly behind a pale but impenetrable curtain. In the falling quiet there was no sky or earth, only snow lifting in the wind, frosting the window glass, chilling the rooms, deadening and hushing the city. At all hours it was necessary to keep a lamp lighted, and Mrs. Miller lost track of the days: Friday was no different from Saturday and on Sunday she went to the grocery: closed, of course.

New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water.

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.

I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany´s.

I've never worked for a newspaper. I've had some very bad reviews in newspapers.

Never love a wild thing...If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky.

Champagne does have one regular drawback: swilled as a regular thing a certain sourness settles in the tummy, and the result is permanent bad breath. Really incurable.

our real fears are the sounds of footsteps walking in the corridors of our minds, and the anxieties, the phantom floatings, they create.

Lively, too. Talky as a jaybird. With something smart to say on every subject: better than the radio.

What I do requires fantastic concentration... but you can't be totally alone, or you lose all contact with reality, so even when I'm engrossed and secluded, Jack Dunphy can be there. He's my oldest and best friend, and best critic too.

People who are having a love-sex relationship are continuously lying to each other because the very nature of the relationship demands that they do, because you have to make a love object of this person, which means that you editorialize about them. You cut out what you don't want to see, you add this if it isn't there. And so therefore you're building a lie.

Work is the only device I know of.

Rusty thinks I should smoke marijuana, and I did for a while, but it only makes me giggle.

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

Most contemporary novelists, especially the American and the French, are too subjective, mesmerized by private demons; theyre enraptured by their navels and confined by a view that ends with their own toes.

Norman Mailer thinks William Burroughs is a genius, which I think is ludicrous beyond words. I don't think William Burroughs has an ounce of talent.

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

The feeble-minded, the neurotic, the criminal, perhaps, also, the artist, have unpredictability and perverted innocence in common.

Randolph," he said, "were you ever as young as me?" And Randolph said: "I was never so old.

But, my dear, so few things are fulfilled: what are most lives but a series of incompleted episodes? 'We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task...' It is wanting to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something.