- Truman Capote: If you want to be a writer, or any person of note, actually, you must realize the importance of that which is overheard the next table over. Great title, by the way. It's yours, darling. It's where all the action is if your table is dull. And you may well be at a dull table in life, I do sympathize. But you master the art of listening to who's right over there.
- C. Z. Guest: The way she said it. "Just two fags fighting." I mean, really, Lee. We owe them a modicum of respect. The homosexual, I mean. We've all relied on walkers over the years. A safe man to take us out, laugh with, a buffer against prying eyes and hands.
- Babe Paley: What's more, a homosexual won't drop you after you reach a certain age. If anything, they lift you higher.
- C. Z. Guest: It is a vital relationship. There's a way one can be in their company that's different than how you have to be with other women. You can finally drop the armor.
- Babe Paley: I don't know if today's women wear armor at all.
- C. Z. Guest: [LAUGHS] They don't have to, they're "liberated."
- Babe Paley: Having to go out with a man, gay or straight, it's over. The end of the walker
- Truman Capote: The lyrics to popular songs are a code for the young and the young only. Once you don't know them, you're no longer in the club.
- Truman Capote: Gay men have always had these particular kind of women friends who all have their odd, arid marriages and their little affairs. - And we're sort of Pomeranians to them, aren't we?
- [Jack Laughs]
- Truman Capote: There to cuddle when they need something fluffy to hold onto. But should we growl or show our teeth, then it's off to the pound we go.
- Jack Dunphy: Yes. Let me explain something to you, and perhaps you'll hear it. Whatever force that hypnotized you about your fucking swans was... It's a distortion, Truman. This is, this is a mirage. These are entrapped lost souls, these ladies of Manhattan that you've collected, and you're so much better now that the spell is broken. I don't think that you actually realize that you wrote "La Cote Basque" in order to free yourself of them.
- Truman Capote: Palm Springs is the perfect place to dry out because you never want to go out anywhere. It's all washed-up starlets and old queens, prickly as the cacti that stand guard over their white stucco fortresses.
- Truman Capote: Movement is youth. We got to keep moving, C.Z. Time never stops. You can't let it get ahead of you. If you blink, baby, the world passes you by. It may be too late, kid.
- Truman Capote: No, you look happy, C.Z. All publicity's good publicity.What is it that Andy says? "The only thing that matters is how many column inches you take up on the page."
- C. Z. Guest: If you're an artist, maybe, but in my circles, it's all about knowing when to enter and when to exit. We had our time. The Black and White Ball, the twist, that was ours. Not disco. I will not be seen like this again.
- Rick: Who's Gore Vidal?
- Truman Capote: Oh, an untalented hack of a writer who was thrown out of the White House by Robert Kennedy Jr. for insulting Jackie's mother Mrs. Hugh D. Auchincloss. And then he had the nerve to touch Jackie violently and inappropriately on the right shoulder. He was drunk.
- Rick: A man should never touch a girl.
- Lee Radziwill: [SIGHS] I just wish he would f*cking stop coming here.
- Nancy 'Slim' Keith: I could throw a glass of Prosecco in his face. Maybe then he'd get the message.
- Lee Radziwill: No, he would just lap it up. We're going to be exemplary, and you know it. We would be in the Post tomorrow, if not tonight. Every waiter is a spy and every diner is someone's tipster.
- Rick: You should see what happens when people try to fix their own air conditioner... .It's all about the Freon, babe. The gas goes through the condenser,makes its way through the coil, comes out as liquid... .The gauge for the condenser.Mallets, hacksaws, chisels, files.