"I don't think I've ever drunk champagne before breakfast before. With breakfast on several occasions, but never before before."
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Quote collection
Truman Capote quotes (page 5 of 16)
302 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"It's a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year."
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"Have you never heard what the wise men say: all of the future exists in the past."
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"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."
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"A boy has to peddle his book."
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"I prefer to underwrite. Simple, clear as a country creek."
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"All writing, all art, is an act of faith. If one tries to contribute to human understanding, how can that be called decadent? It's like saying a declaration of love is an act of decadence. Any work of art, provide it springs from a sincere motivation to further understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love."
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"And since gin to artifice bears the same relation as tears to mascara, her attractions at once dissembled."
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"Good writing is rewriting."
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"Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go."
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"But it's Sunday, Mr. Bell. Clocks are slow on Sundays."
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"I am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch."
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"Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing."
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"I don't want to own anything until I find a place where me and things go together."
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"When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely."
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"I hated Hemingway. I liked Faulkner but he was a bore."
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"The average personality reshapes frequently, every few years even our bodies undergo a complete overhaul - desirable or not, it is a natural thing that we should change. All right, here were two people who never would change. That is what Mildred Grossman had in common with Holly Golightly. They would never change because they'd been given their character too soon; which, like sudden riches, leads to a lack of proportion: the one had splurged herself into a top-heavy realist, the other a lopsided romantic."
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"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."
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"I dream of eagles and bring forth sparrows."
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