Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely.
It is the want to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something.
The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. His work means nothing, otherwise. It has no meaning.
I would have liked to have known Oscar Wilde because I think he must have been very amusing and entertaining.
Shoot, boy, the country's just fulla folks what knows everything, and don't understand nothing, just fullofem.
She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox.
I am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch.
I thought that Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment that I cut his throat.
Most secrets should never be told, but especially those that are more menacing to the listener than to the teller.
He’d always been willing to confess his faults, for, by admitting them, it was as if he made them no longer exist.
Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pearl sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.
Many universities have asked me to come for a semester but I don't want to do it because I don't have the patience.
I think I would have written five times as much as I've written if I didn't have this terrible sense of perfection.
Most people don't find their creativity. There are more unsung geniuses that don't even know they have great talent.
How do I look so young? Quite simple: a complete vegetable diet, 12 hours sleep a night, and lots and lots of make-up.
I've never had an affair with somebody who wasn't at the same time a very good friend of mine, if you see what I mean.
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.
June, July, all through the warm months she hibernated like a winter animal who did not know spring had come and gone.
would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn't read this sort of thing without her lipstick.
She is pure Alice in Wonderland, and her appearance and demeanor are a nicely judged mix of the Red Queen and a Flamingo.
I haven't anything against whores, except this: some of them may have an honest tongue but they all have dishonest hearts.
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.
I don't think I've ever drunk champagne before breakfast before. With breakfast on several occasions, but never before before.
Of course, at their best, movies are anti-literature and, as a medium, belong not to writers, not to actors, but to directors.
So the days, the last days, blow about in a memory, hazy autumnal, all alike as leaves: until a day unlike any other I've lived
The wind is us-- it gathers and remembers all our voices, then sends them talking and telling through the leaves and the fields.
I've been working, working, working, and you know, sometimes you look back at your work and you see that it just isn't any good.
The feeble-minded, the neurotic, the criminal, perhaps, also, the artist, have unpredictability and perverted innocence in common.
Everybody has to feel superior to somebody," she said. "But it's customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege.
I loved her enough to forget myself, my self pitying despairs, and be content that something she thought happy was going to happen.
I don't use a typewriter, I write longhand, with a pencil. Essentially I'm a horizontal writer. I think better when I'm lying down.
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.
I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon.
I knew Lee Harvey Oswald, and I knew Jack Kennedy. The odds against that-one person knowing all four of those men-must be astounding.
I guess if you're that thin and that small you don't need to take up too much space or breathe that much air. You just keep on going.
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.
Never demean yourself by talking back to a critic, never. Write those letters to the editor in your head, but don't put them on paper.
One of the most difficult things in writing a novel or anything at all is to choose the point of view from which it's going to be told.
our real fears are the sounds of footsteps walking in the corridors of our minds, and the anxieties, the phantom floatings, they create.
Personally, I rather think that if you're not creative you've got a problem on your hands. If you are creative you've got a double problem.
As long as you live, there's always something waiting; and even if it's bad, and you know it's bad, what can you do? You can't stop living.
There were hints of sunrise on the rim of the sky, yet it was still dark, and the traces of morning color were like goldfish swimming in ink.
Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot". ~Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's, 1958, spoken by the character Holly Golightly
If you weren't here, if you could be anywhere you wanted to be, doing anything you wanted to do, where would you be and what would you be doing?
If a man doesn't like baseball, then he must like horses, and if he doesn't like either of them, well, I'm in trouble anyway: he don't like girls.
A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.
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.
If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there's no point in it....for me, every act of the art of solving a mystery.
Whatever relationship you have, man or woman, you have to be very attentive and you have to be a very good friend to them regardless of what they do.
The more you know about something, the harder it becomes. You become more and more of a perfectionist. I think it's a curse... It's a form of illness!