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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.

Truman Capote

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Truman Capote
Age: 59 †
Born: 1924
Born: September 30
Died: 1984
Died: August 25
Actor
Artist
Author
Autobiographer
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Truman Streckfus Persons
Truman Garcia Capote
Right
Deny
Work
Material
Result
Observations
Materials
Gathered
Writer
Condemn
Results
Denied
Use
Endeavor
Cannot
Observation

More quotes by Truman Capote

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Shoot, boy, the country's just fulla folks what knows everything, and don't understand nothing, just fullofem.
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My yardstick is how somebody treats me.
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The wind is us-- it gathers and remembers all our voices, then sends them talking and telling through the leaves and the fields.
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My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.
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When I am writing, I try to do it five hours a day but I spend about two of those just fooling around.
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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.
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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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There is such an animal as a nonstylist, only they're not writers - they're typists.
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Traveling wears me out.
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Reading dreams. That's what started her walking down the road. Every day she'd walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day she just kept on.
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When I'm writing, I never write more than four hours a day.
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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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I think I would have written five times as much as I've written if I didn't have this terrible sense of perfection.
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She took off her dark glasses and squinted at me. It was as though her eyes were shattered prisms, the dots of blue and gray and green like broken bits of sparkle.
Truman Capote
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A work of art is one of mystery, the one extreme magic everything else is either arithmetic or biology.
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It is the want to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something
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But mostly they were lies I told it wasn't my fault, I couldn't remember, because it was as though I'd been to one of those supernatural castles visited by characters in legends: once away, you do not remember, all that is left is the ghostly echo of haunting wonder.
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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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When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium.
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At one time I used to keep notebooks with outlines for stories. But I found doing this somehow deadened the idea in my imagination. If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then you can't forget it-it will haunt you till it's written.
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