Truman Capote Quotes

Some people say you have to fight cancer. But it was fighting me. The cure was worse than the disease, and it left me totally exhausted and depressed. I just hid myself away in my daughter-in-law's flat.

I wasn't even sure I'd be able to walk. I couldn't even go outside. Maybe I was just burnt crisp from the gruelling schedule I had been keeping for years.

The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. It's like a cancer that's metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?

It wasn't so much destroying my dancing, it was destroying me.

I almost died, secretly, behind closed doors.

That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said - one of the famous lady novelists - 'unhappy is the family that contains an author'?

Such persons are windows through which one looks into terrible worlds.

'Saving Grace' was a full stretch-out - literally, physically, spiritually, psychologically. And I needed to take a year-and-a-half off when it was over.

It wears on your soul when you take on the mental state of a dark character.

A three-month training camp writes you off, I wake up and I literally can't get out of bed.

I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.

Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it's the worst.

Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven't even got a self to express.

How could you not want to draw breath one more day? How could your own life be such a cheap commodity? But then I started to understand: when your existence is hell, death must be heaven.

I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my head, too?

My brain's gone, my soul's worn and my spirit is torn The rest of my body's still bein operated on.

Fear is not a disease of the body; fear kills the soul.

The thing about wounded people is wounded people are scared that those wounds are going to end up killing them. They pretend like they're not there, or they ignore them.

Scars are just a treasure map for pain you've buried too deep to remember.

It will be as if I'd never existed. The words ran through my head, lacking the perfect clarity of my hallucination last night. They were just words, soundless, like print on a page. Just words, but they ripped the hole wide open, and I stomped on the brake, knowing I should not drive while this incapacitated. I curled over, pressing my face against the steering wheel and trying to breathe without lungs.

Sometimes I worry that I've lost the plot My twitching muscles tease my flippant thoughts I never really dreamed of heaven much Until we put him in the ground. There is nothing as lucky, as easy, or free

But those with shattered souls find it very difficult to speak.

Neurosis is the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.

He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.

Don't tell me that [broken heartstrings] hurt less than a broken bone, that an ingrown life is something surgeons can cut away, that there's no way for it to metastasize - it does.