"I'll pay you a million dollars if you tell your life story for true."
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Quote collection
Truman Capote quotes (page 8 of 16)
302 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I will say only that all a writer has to work with is the material he has gathered as the result of his own endeavor and observations, and he cannot be denied the right to use it. Condemn, but not deny."
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"It's odd about tattoos. I've talked to several hundred men convicted of homicide-multiple homicide, in most cases. The only common denominate- I could find among them was tattoos. A good eighty percent of them were heavily tattooed."
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"But there were moments when she played songs that made you wonder where she learned them, where indeed she came from. Harsh-tender wandering tunes with words that smacked of pinewoods or prairie. One went: Don’t wanna sleep, Don’t wanna die, Just wanna go a-travelin’ through the pastures of the sky; and this one seemed to gratify her the most, for often she continued it long after her hair hard dried, after the sun had gone and there were lighted windows in the dusk."
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"There is no shame — having a dirty face — the shame comes when you keep it dirty."
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"There's something really the matter with most people who wear tattoos. There's at least some terrible story. I know from experience that there's always something terribly flawed about people who are tattooed, above some little something that Johnny had done in the Navy, even though that's a bad sign...It's terrible. Psychologically it's crazy. Most people who are tattooed, it's the sign of some feeling of inferiority, they're trying to establish some macho identification for themselves."
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"Technically I feel total fluidity in writing. I feel there's nothing technically that I can't do the way a certain sort of pianist feels that. But that doesn't mean it comes easily. It doesn't."
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"Wrinkles and bones, white hair and diamonds: I can't wait."
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"Rusty thinks I should smoke marijuana, and I did for a while, but it only makes me giggle."
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"I was eleven, then I was sixteen. Though no honors came my way, those were the lovely years."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Leave it to me: I'm always top banana in the shock department."
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"I'm very scared, Buster. Yes, at last. Because it could go on forever. Not knowing what's yours until you've thrown it away."
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"She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox."
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"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."
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"A disquieting loneliness came into my life, but it induced no hunger for friends of longer acquaintance: they seemed now like a salt-free, sugarless diet."
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"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."
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"Yes: but aren't love and marriage notoriously synonymous in the minds of most women? Certainly very few men get the first without promising the second: love, that is--if it's just a matter of spreading her legs, almost any woman will do that for nothing."
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"Really being friends is the most important part, I think, of any relationship."
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