Truman Capote Quotes

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Truths are illlusions which we have forgotten are illusions.

The truth is overrated.

Truth: An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance …

Did you ever think that maybe what you see isn't really what's true?

Our truth of nowadays is not what is, but what others can be convinced of; just as we call "money" not only that which is legal, but also any counterfeit that will pass.

To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.

We can't believe what we believe to be untrue, and we can't love what we believe to be unreal.

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

Truth is a naked and open daylight, that does not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. . . A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure

Since I wasn't able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell.

Dignity is often a veil between us and the real truth of things.

You can't really pretend something is rosier than it is and expect people to buy it.

The true value of somebody in this town is very hard to determine. It's all smoke and mirrors.

Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

I realize that nothing's as it seems.

Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn't mean it is simple.

A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths.

It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the 'fronts' people assume before one another's eyes, and the 'front' a writer puts on the face of reality.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

Image is what people perceive my life to be. It's nothing like the truth.

Truth is always a delusion.

It's very difficult to distinguish between what a person believes and what they say they believe.

Telling the truth to people who misunderstand you is generally promoting a falsehood, isn't it?

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.