Truman Capote Quotes

I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was no egoist… he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the one beautiful comrade, the only inseparable love… poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point.

What I’ve found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany’s. It calms me down right away, the quiteness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there

He loved her, he loved her, and until he'd loved her she had never minded being alone, she'd liked to much to be alone. At school, where all the girls had crushes on one another and trailed in sweetheart pairs, she had kept to herself: except once, and that was when she'd allowed Naomi to adore her. Naomi, scholarly, and bourgeois as a napkin ring, had written her passionate poems that really rhymed, and once she'd let Naomi kiss her on the lips. But she had not loved her: it is very seldom that a person loves anyone they cannot in some way envy: she could not envy any girl, only men: and so Naomi became mislaid in her thoughts, then lost, like an old letter, one which had never been carefully read.

"A girl doesn't read this sort of thing without her lipstick." -Holly Golightly

It may be normal, darling: but I'd rather be natural.

But, ah, the energy we spend hiding from one another, afraid as we are of being identified.

Very few authors, especially the unpublished, can resist an invitation to read aloud.

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

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.

"she wanted to know what American writers I liked. "Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson…" "No, living." Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rival factor being what it is, for a contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, "Not Hemingway — a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe — all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn't living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Tender Is the Night. I really like Willa Cather. Have you read My Mortal Enemy?" With no particular expression, she said, "Actually, I wrote it.

You exist in a half-world suspended between two superstructures, one self-expression and the other self-destruction. You are strong, but there is a flaw in your strength, and unless you can learn how to control it the flaw will prove stronger than your strength and defeat you.

If some wizard would like to give me a present, let him give me a bottle filled with the voices of that kitchen, the ha ha ha and the fire whispering, a bottle brimming with its buttery sugary smells . . .

Of course people couldn't help but think I must be a bit of a dyke myself. And of course I am. Everyone is: a bit. So what? That never discouraged a man yet, in fact it seems to goad them on.

But, Doc, I'm not fourteen any more, and I'm not Lulamae. But the terrible part is (and I realized it while we were standing there) I am. I'm still stealing turkey eggs and running through a brier patch. Only now I call it having the mean reds.

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