Truman Capote Quotes - Page 7

I'll pay you a million dollars if you tell your life story for true.

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

I know the next best thing is often the very best.

Hulga the whole while hollering like a half-slaughtered hog. (Attention, students of literature! Alliteration - have you noticed? - is my least vice.)

I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods.

Leave it to me: I'm always top banana in the shock department.

I think most people are very, very much motivated by sex - greed, sex, and hunger.

But I'm not a saint yet. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius.

You're wonderful. Unique. I love you.

Since each story presents its own technical problems, obviously one can't generalize about them on a two-times-two-equals-four basis. Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has defined the natural shape of his story is just this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right.

I've tried to believe, but I don't, I can't, and there's no use pretending.

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.

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

Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pearl sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.

June, July, all through the warm months she hibernated like a winter animal who did not know spring had come and gone.

The instant she saw the letter she squinted her eyes and bent her lips in a tough tiny smile that advanced her age immeasurably. "Darling," she instructed me, "would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn't read this sort of thing without her lipstick.

Many universities have asked me to come for a semester but I don't want to do it because I don't have the patience.

But he does look stupid.' Yearning. Not stupid. He wants awfully to be on the inside staring out: anybody with their nose pressed against a glass is liable to look stupid.

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.

we don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am I.

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.

All literature is gossip.

Oh Jesus God we did belong to each other. He was mine.

I'll wager at the end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are -- her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie pawing earth over her bone - just what they've always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.

Talent is a valued tormentor.