"Those fellows, they're always crying over killers. Never a thought for the victims."

"I've always seen myself as a winner even as a kid. If I hadn't I just might have gone down the drain a couple of times. I've got something inside of me peasantlike and stubborn and I'm in it 'til the end of the race."

"The average personality re-shapes frequently, every few years even our bodies undergo a complete overhaul-desirable or not, it is a natural thing that we should change."

"Kay yawned and rested her forehead against the windowpane, her fingers idly strumming the guitar: the strings sang a hollow, lulling tune, as monotonously soothing as the Southern landscape, smudged in darkness, flowing past the window. An icy winter moon rolled above the train across the night sky like a thin white wheel."

"Don't wanna sleep, don't wanna die, just wanna go a-travelin' through the pastures of the sky."

"You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who's a friend."

"I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was no egoist he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the one beautiful comrade, the only inseparable love poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point."

"Once a thing is set to happen, all you can do is hope it won't. Or will-depending. As long as you live, there's always something waiting, and even if it's bad, and you know it's bad, what can you do? You can't stop living."

"My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely."

"Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down."

"I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end."

"Duntz asked Smith, 'Added up, how much money did you get from the Cutters?' 'Between forty and fifty dollars."

"He loved her, he loved her, and until he'd loved her she had never minded being alone...."

"The trouble with all these far-right and far-left mentalities is that they can encompass only one side of an argument and are congenitally incapable of holding two opinions in their heads at the same time."

"Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself."

"No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me."

"And in this moment, like a swift intake of breath, the rain came."

"All children are morbid: it's their one saving grace."

"I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil."

"I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Which isn't being pious. Just practical. Cancer may cool you, but the other's sure to."

"But if you live your life without feeling and compassion for your fellowman-you are as an animal-'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth' & happiness & peace of mind is not attained by living thus."

"I have an extremely strong, masculine mind and a feminine sensibility level, which is kind of an unusual combination. Both men and women tell me things and I can relate on two levels simultaneously."

"I was eleven, then I was sixteen. Though no honors came my way, those were the lovely years."

"I think the argument that no whites are free of racism is quite erroneous. But then, on another level, does it really matter if anybody is free of any negative feeling about anything? No matter how much you love somebody, you know, there's some part of him you don't like."

"A kind of silence, if I may say, was walking through the house, and, like most silence, it was not silent at all: it rapped on the doors, echoed in the clocks, creaked on the stairs, leaned forward to peer into my face and explode."

"Because it's indeed difficult to portray, in any meaningful depth, another being, his appearance, speech, mentality, without to some degree, and often for quite trifling cause, offending him. The truth seems to be the nobody likes to see himself described as he is, or cares to see exactly set down what he said and did. Well, even i can understand that - because i don't like it myself when I am the sitter not the portraitist: the frailty of egos- and the more accurate the strokes, the greater the resentment."

"Very few authors, especially the unpublished, can resist an invitation to read aloud."

"All literature is gossip."

"The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply."

"It is the want to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something."

"Fame is only good for one thing - they will cash your check in a small town."

"Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody. You can't have too many friends because then you're just not really friends."

"The only rich women who ever interested me, the ones who were ever my friends, were adventuresses--people who were total self-creations."

"Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing."

"The average personality reshapes frequently, every few years even our bodies undergo a complete overhaul - desirable or not, it is a natural thing that we should change. All right, here were two people who never would change. That is what Mildred Grossman had in common with Holly Golightly. They would never change because they'd been given their character too soon; which, like sudden riches, leads to a lack of proportion: the one had splurged herself into a top-heavy realist, the other a lopsided romantic."

"I like to talk on TV about those things that aren't worth writing about."

"The most dangerous thing in the world is to make a friend of an Englishman because he'll come sleep in your closet rather than spend 10 shillings on a hotel."

"In California everyone goes to a therapist is a therapist or is a therapist going to a therapist."

"What are your chief vices? And virtues? I have no vices. The concept doesn't exist in my vocabulary. My chief virtue is gratitude."

"She was never without dark glasses, she was always well groomed, there was a consequential good taste in the plainness of her clothes, the blues and grays and lack of luster that made her, herself, shine so."

"That isn't writing at all, it's typing."

"All his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved."

"If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there's no point in it. . . . for me, every act of art is the act of solving a mystery."

"The answer is good things only happen to you if you're good. Good? Honest is more what I mean... Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart."

"It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them."

"When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely."

"The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. His works means nothing, otherwise. It has no meaning."

"Love, having no geography, knows no boundaries."

"It snowed all week. Wheels and footsteps moved soundlessly on the street, as if the business of living continued secretly behind a pale but impenetrable curtain. In the falling quiet there was no sky or earth, only snow lifting in the wind, frosting the window glass, chilling the rooms, deadening and hushing the city. At all hours it was necessary to keep a lamp lighted, and Mrs. Miller lost track of the days: Friday was no different from Saturday and on Sunday she went to the grocery: closed, of course."

"What I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter's evening."