I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.

— Truman Capote

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

— Truman Capote

In California everyone goes to a therapist is a therapist or is a therapist going to a therapist.

— Truman Capote

I only object when any one particular group...gets a stranglehold on American criticism and squeezes out anybody who doesn't conform to its own standards.... The ax falls, ecumenically, on the head of anybody...who doesn't share this group's parochial preoccupations.

— Truman Capote

I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was no egoist… he was merely another of us who, in our unalterable 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.

— Truman Capote

I think the argument that no whites are free of racism is quite erroneous. But then, on another level, does it really matter if anybody is free of any negative feeling about anything? No matter how much you love somebody, you know, there's some part of him you don't like.

— Truman Capote

It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.

— Truman Capote

It's bad enough in life to do without something YOU want; but confound it, what gets my goat is not being able to give somebody something you want THEM to have.

— Truman Capote

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.

— Truman Capote

It was as if I were an oyster and somebody forced a grain of sand into my shell -- a grain of sand that I didn't know was there and didn't particularly welcome. Then a pearl started forming around the grain, and it irritated me, made me angry, tortured me sometimes. But the oyster can't help becoming obsessed with the pearl.

— Truman Capote