Truman Capote
When I make fried chicken I always serve masses and masses of fresh mangos. It's a great combination.Collection: Chickens
Lee Harvey Oswald was boiling over about everything: the American ambassador; the Russians-he was mad at them because they wouldn't let him stay in Moscow. We talked to him for about half an hour, and my Italian friend didn't think the guy was worth filing a story about. Just another paranoid hysteric; the Moscow woods were rampant with those. I never thought about him again, not until many years later. Not until after the assassination when I saw his picture flashed on television.Collection: Thinking
There was an American girl, Priscilla Johnson. She worked for U.P. in Moscow. She knew [John] Kennedy, and she met [Lee Harvey] Oswald around the same time I did. But I can tell you something else almost as curious.Collection: Girl
Jay Sebring cut my hair a couple of times.Collection: Couple
I've never been a teacher in my life.Collection: Teacher
If Francoise Sagan hadn't written a book called A Chateau in Sweden, I would certainly write a short story called A Chateau in Puerto Rico. And I may yet.Collection: Book
would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn't read this sort of thing without her lipstick.Collection: Girl
I think to be a good teacher you need an enormous amount of patience and I'm a very impatient person.Collection: Teacher
If you sweep a house, and tend its fires and fill its stove, and there is love in you all the years you are doing this, then you and that house are married, that house is yours.Collection: Fire
I feel that all a writer has is his own experience.Collection: Feels
My father was quite an attractive guy. He was very intelligent and very amusing. I didn't like him. He was always very nice to me but I just didn't like him.Collection: Father
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.Collection: Friday
Rusty thinks I should smoke marijuana, and I did for a while, but it only makes me giggle.Collection: Marijuana
Work is the only device I know of.Collection: Devices
The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. His work means nothing, otherwise. It has no meaning.Collection: Mean
Brazil was beastly but Buenos Aires the best. Not Tiffany's, but almost.Collection: Buenos Aires
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.Collection: Thinking
I couldn't understand a sense of unease that multiplied until I could hear my heart beating.Collection: Heart
You don't understand. You've never hated anybody. No, I never have. We're allotted just so much time on earth, and I wouldn't want the Lord to see me wasting mine in any such manner.Collection: Time On Earth
The feeble-minded, the neurotic, the criminal, perhaps, also, the artist, have unpredictability and perverted innocence in common.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Believe
Randolph," he said, "were you ever as young as me?" And Randolph said: "I was never so old.Collection: Said
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.Collection: Champagne Drinking
I thought that Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment that I cut his throat.Collection: Nice
You don't run out on people; you run out on yourself.Collection: Running
I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany´s.Collection: Morning
you got to want it to be good, and I don't want it.Collection: Want
She sounds the way bananas taste.Collection: Sound
You can do films for the fun of it, or the thrill of it, but certain films you can't do unless there's something driving you, something you have a passion for that will pull you through.Collection: Fun
When you've got nowhere to turn, turn on the gas.Collection: Depression
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.Collection: Prayer
Are there any writers on the literary scene whom I consider truly great? Yes: Truman Capote.Collection: Truman
It's like a jumble of huts in a jungle somewhere. I don't understand how you can live there. It's really, completely dead. Walk along the street, there's nothing moving. I've lived in small Spanish fishing villages which were literally sunny all day long everyday of the week, but they weren't as boring as Los Angeles.Collection: Moving
One day, I started writing, not knowing that I had chained myself for life to a noble but merciless master. When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation... I'm here alone in my dark madness, all by myself with my deck of cards - and, of course, the whip God gave me.Collection: Writing
Any work of art, provided it springs from a sincere motivation to further understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Honesty
Ever since I was a child, folks have thought they had me pegged, because of the way I am, the way I talk. And they're always wrong.Collection: Children
[Y]outh is hardly human: it can't be, for the young never believe they will die...especially would they never believe that death comes, and often, in forms other than the natural one.Collection: Inspirational
Clocks indeed must have their sacrifice: what is death but an offering to time and eternity?Collection: Inspirational
Never love a wild thing...If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky.Collection: Sky
There is such an animal as a nonstylist, only they're not writers - they're typists.Collection: Animal
That's the question: is truth an illusion, or is illusion truth, or are they essentially the same? Myself, I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true.Collection: Long
Poor slob without a name. It's a little inconvenient, his not having a name. But I haven't the right to give him one: he'll have to wait until he belongs to somebody. We just sort of took up by the river one day, we don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am I. I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together.Collection: Independent
She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox.Collection: Real
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 CapoteCollection: Morning
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.Collection: Mean
New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water.Collection: New York