Quote

One day, I started writing, not knowing that I had chained myself for life to a noble but merciless master. When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation... I'm here alone in my dark madness, all by myself with my deck of cards - and, of course, the whip God gave me.

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
Knowing
Noble
Whip
Dark
Gift
Whips
Hands
Masters
Deck
Also
Gave
Solely
Self
Started
Intended
Writing
Courses
Cards
Flagellation
Life
Course
Madness
Merciless
Alone
Master
Chained

More quotes by Truman Capote

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Half the people who snuff people, that's what they want: recognition. Get their picture in the paper.
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I think to be a good teacher you need an enormous amount of patience and I'm a very impatient person.
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I think most people are very, very much motivated by sex - greed, sex, and hunger.
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Then why does Kenneth Anger wear a picture locket on a chain around his neck? On one side of the locket there is a picture of you on the other there is an image of a frog with an inscription: Bobby Beausoleil changed into a frog by Kenneth Anger. A voodoo amulet, so to say.
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would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn't read this sort of thing without her lipstick.
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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.
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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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I was terribly sure trees and flowers were the same as birds or people. That they thought things and talked among themselves. And we could hear them if we really tried. It was just a matter of emptying your head of all other sounds. Being very quiet and listening very hard. Sometimes I still believe that. But one can never get quiet enough.
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Jay Sebring cut my hair a couple of times.
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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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All human life has its seasons and cycles, and no one's personal chaos can be permanent. Winter, after all, gives way to spring and summer, though sometimes when branches stay dark and the earth cracks with ice, one thinks they will never come, that spring, and that summer, but they do, and always.
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You can do films for the fun of it, or the thrill of it, but certain films you can't do unless there's something driving you, something you have a passion for that will pull you through.
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Most contemporary novelists, especially the American and the French, are too subjective, mesmerized by private demons theyre enraptured by their navels and confined by a view that ends with their own toes.
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I prefer to underwrite. Simple, clear as a country creek.
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Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is very difficult to look with wonder it is best done when one is a child after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge of childhood and walk across it.
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In California everyone goes to a therapist, is a therapist, or is a therapist going to a therapist.
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I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
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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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The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. His work means nothing, otherwise. It has no meaning.
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Of course, at their best, movies are anti-literature and, as a medium, belong not to writers, not to actors, but to directors.
Truman Capote