Truman Capote Quotes - Page 2

Home is where you feel at home. I'm still looking.

Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is very difficult to look with wonder; it is best done when one is a child; after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge of childhood and walk across it.

Everybody has to feel superior to somebody," she said. "But it's customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege.

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

Most people don't find their creativity. There are more unsung geniuses that don't even know they have great talent.

I was terribly sure trees and flowers were the same as birds or people. That they thought things and talked among themselves. And we could hear them if we really tried. It was just a matter of emptying your head of all other sounds. Being very quiet and listening very hard. Sometimes I still believe that. But one can never get quiet enough.

The better the actor, the more stupid he is.

Are the dead as lonesome as the living?

It's a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year.

Some cities, like wrapped boxes under Christmas trees, conceal unexpected gifts, secret delights. Some cities will always remain wrapped boxes, containers of riddles never to be solved, nor even to be seen by vacationing visitors, or, for that matter, the most inquisitive, persistent travelers.

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.

The good thing about masturbation is that you don't have to get dressed up for it.

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.

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.

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

That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman--the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.

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

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

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.

And in this moment, like a swift intake of breath, the rain came.

There is nobody in the world that you can't get if you really concentrate on it, if you really want them. You've got to want it to the exclusion of everything else.

It’s better to look at the sky than live there

I thought of the future, and spoke of the past.

In my garden, after a rainfall, you can faintly, yes, hear the breaking of new blooms.

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.