- D.A.'s Secretary: I'm sorry. The D.A. doesn't take calls from strange women.
- Truman Capote: Who says I'm strange?
- Nelle Harper Lee: America is not a country where the small gesture goes noticed. We're not a country like France, where charm -- something light or effervescent -- can survive. We want everything you have, and we want it as fast as you can turn it out.
- Truman Capote: When you're talking to them, they seem like perfectly nice boys. To be frank, I'm much more concerned for my safety around Norman Mailer.
- [about the Kansas townspeople]
- Truman Capote: Do you think everyone keeps calling me "lady" to be mean, or can they honestly not tell?
- Gore Vidal: [on Truman's voice] To the lucky person who has never heard it, I can only say: imagine what a brussels sprout would sound like, if a brussels sprout could talk.
- Diana Vreeland: Here's a word I loathe: eccentric. Eccentric is a word that boring people use to describe someone I think of as interesting. A great many people think of me as eccentric simply because when I have my shoes polished, I have the entire shoe polished. Top, sides and soles. Some people think it eccentric that every morning I have my maid iron my money. When I told Truman I had my maid iron my money, you know what he said? Here's what he didn't say: "How eccentric." Here's what he did say: "How wonderful."
- Perry Smith: What is punishment? Being in jail isn't punishment, if you didn't like it on the outside. And neither is death, if it was painful to live.
- Truman Capote: Artists have the power, through our imagination to escape and degenerate world and create a better one.
- Truman Capote: [Looking at centre fold photos in a girlie magazine] Good heavens, look at this. This is revolting! Women look much better in clothes, much better. Goodness gracious, look at this messy thing!