How do I look so young? Quite simple: a complete vegetable diet, 12 hours sleep a night, and lots and lots of make-up.
It takes a lot of bad writing to get to a little good writing.
Good writing is rewriting.
I think the only person a writer has an obligation to is himself. If what I write doesn’t fulfill something in me, if I don’t honestly feel it’s the best I can do, then I’m miserable.
I thought that Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment that I cut his throat.
I thought of the future, and spoke of the past.
It is very seldom that a person loves anyone they cannot in some way envy.
You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who’s a friend.
You don’t run out on people; you run out on yourself.
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.
Most secrets should never be told, but especially those that are more menacing to the listener than to the teller.
She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox.
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 Capote.
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.
I live in Brooklyn. By choice. Those ignorant of its allures are entitled to wonder why.
Of course, at their best, movies are anti-literature and, as a medium, belong not to writers, not to actors, but to directors.
I always felt that nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that’s why I started writing. At least on paper I could put down what I thought.
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.
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.
Brazil was beastly but Buenos Aires the best. Not Tiffany’s, but almost.