Truman Capote Quotes

She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox.

What distressed me most - more even than my own folly - was the perplexing question, How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near?

Who seems most hideous when adorned the most.

A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.

...beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.

I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.

Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.

Accentuated plainness and accentuated vice ought to bring about harmony. Beauty lies in harmony, in style, whether it be the harmony of ugliness or beauty, vice or virtue.

The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both.

Socrates, who was a perfect model in all great qualities, ... hit on a body and face so ugly and so incongruous with the beauty of his soul, he who was so madly in love with beauty.

I've been lucky to have a beautiful wife and children. The idea that something so beautiful can be so horrific at the same time. Beauty is a complex thing.

Belgrade is the ugliest city in the world in the most beautiful place in the world.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think.

Real humanity presents a mixture of all that is most sublime and beautiful with all that is vilest and most monstrous in the world.

Ugliness has its own splendor when it houses a soul of beauty.

Talk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting.

To me, that ugliness, that grotesqueness - that's the essence [of life]. That's where you realize, it's not about all the consonance and the harmony. It's all the parts that are wrong that help explain why we're drawn to something - what the mystery is - just as much as the beautiful things.

Beauty can come from the strangest of places, even the most disgusting of places.

Gold lends a touch of beauty even to the ugly.

The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers' bathing suits. It was beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.

God gives us the ugliness so we don't take the beautiful things in life for granted.

The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.

Does he have ugly hands? Sometimes beautiful people have ugly hands." "No he has kind of amazing hands.

It's the flaw that brings out the beauty.

I've heard what people are saying, and it's a very weird thing. They're going into a realm where it's somethign that's almost ugly, rather than something that can be so beautiful.