Patricia Highsmith quotes:

I know you have it in you, Guy," Anne said suddenly at the end of a silence, "the capacity to be terribly happy.

Robert Walker as Bruno was excellent. He had elegance and humor, and the proper fondness for his mother.

They roared into the Lincoln Tunnel. A wild, inexplicable excitement mounted in Therese as she stared through the windshield. She wished the tunnel might cave in and kill them both, that their bodies might be dragged out together. She felt Carol glancing at her from time to time.

Then Carol slipped her arm under her neck, and all the length of their bodies touched fitting as if something had prearranged it. Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale white flower, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven, she wondered

I hated cracking the whip, and these juries turn into political things.

That wasn't a bad price for a first book. My agent upped it as much as possible. I was 27 and had nothing behind me. I was working like a fool to earn a living and pay for my apartment.

I only know it takes weeks to recover, as if one had been in a car accident.

I don't want to know movie directors. I don't want to be close to them. I don't want to interfere with their work. I don't want them to interfere with mine.

I didn't hang around films. I don't know if I'd ever seen Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.

Finally, Carol said in a tone of hopelessness, "Darling, can I ask you to forgive me?" The tone hurt Therese more than the question. "I love you, Carol." "But do you see what it means?

I think J.D. Salinger is correct in granting no interviews, and in making no speeches

I think J.D. Salinger is correct in granting no interviews, and in making no speeches.

I can't write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman.

My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.

When I am thickening my plots, I like to think 'What if ... What if ... ' Thus my imagination can move from the likely, which everyone can think of, to the unlikely-but-possible, my preferred plot.

For neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not.

What chance combination of shadow and sound and his own thoughts had created it?

I'd had a little feeling of destiny. Because, you see, what I mean about affinities is true from friendships down to even the accidental glance at someone on the street-there's always a definite reason somewhere. I think even the poets would agree with me.

She had seen just now what she had only sensed before, that the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what she and Carol had together seemed no longer love or anything happy but a monster between them, with each of them caught in a fist.

I don't think Ripley is gay. He appreciates good looks in other men, that's true. But he's married in later books. I'm not saying he's very strong in the sex department. But he makes it in bed with his wife.

I don`t set the alarm to get up. I get up when I feel like it.

The conversation seemed just as boring and forgettable as details of American history around 1805, for example.

If people have bought something of mine, they know by now that I will decline writing it for the movies.

I don't set the alarm to get up. I get up when I feel like it.

Every man is his own law court and punishes himself enough.

Honesty, for me, is usually the worst policy imaginable.

Her life was a series of zigzags. At nineteen, she was anxious.

I tell him his business, all business, is legalized throat-cutting, like marriage is legalized fornication.

But there were too many points at which the other self could invade the self he wanted to preserve, and there were too many forms of invasion: certain words, sounds, lights, actions his hands or feet performed, and if he did nothing at all, heard and saw nothing, the shouting of some triumphant inner voice that shocked him and cowed him."

It was the seventh or eighth floor, she couldn't remember which. A streetcar crawled past the front of the hotel, and people on the sidewalk moved in every direction, with legs on either side of them, and it crossed her mind to jump.

I was in New York. Hitchcock was in California. He rang me to make a report on his progress and said, I'm having trouble. I've just sacked my second screenwriter.

I have Graham Greene's telephone number, but I wouldn't dream of using it. I don't seek out writers because we all want to be alone.

I prefer to live in the country where it's quiet. Woody Allen movies there are dubbed into Italian.

I hope it will be set in California. In a way, I made a mistake, because a New Jersey policeman can't operate that way in New York. But in California, he can move between different counties.

Some fellow from the Third World kept hammering for prizes for a Communist film which was rotten.

I have no television - I hate it.

Ripley is married. And he's not lost. He has his feet on the ground.

And no book, and possibly no painting, when it is finished, is ever exactly like the first dream of it.

Anticipation! It occurred to him that his anticipation was more pleasant to him than the experiencing.

But there was not a moment when she did not see Carol in her mind, and all she saw, she seemed to see through Carol. That evening, the dark flat streets of New York, the tomorrow of work, the milk bottle dropped and broken in her sink, became unimportant. She flung herself on her bed and drew a line with a pencil on a piece of paper. And another line, carefully, and another. A world was born around her, like a bright forest with a million shimmering leaves.

But there were too many points at which the other self could invade the self he wanted to preserve, and there were too many forms of invasion: certain words, sounds, lights, actions his hands or feet performed, and if he did nothing at all, heard and saw nothing, the shouting of some triumphant inner voice that shocked him and cowed him.

Dusk was falling quickly. It was just after 7 P.M., and the month was October.

Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.

Everything human is alien to me.

He liked the fact that Venice had no cars. It made the city human. The streets were like veins, he thought, and the people were the blood, circulating everywhere.

He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with. They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence. It was as simple as that. And wasn't that worth something? He existed. Not many people in the world knew how to, even if they had the money. It really didn't take money, masses of money, it took a certain security.

Honestly, I don't understand why people get so worked up about a little murder!

How easy it was to lie when one had to lie!

I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial.

I should love to do a novel, about one abnormal character seeing present-day life, very ordinary life, yet arresting through it, abnormality, until at the end the reader sees, and with little reluctance, that he is not abnormal at all, and that the main character might as well be himself.

I think people often try to find through sex things that are much easier to find in other ways.

I was in New York. Hitchcock was in California. He rang me to make a report on his progress and said, I'm having trouble. I've just sacked my second screenwriter

If people have bought something of mine, they know by now that I will decline writing it for the movies

In view of the fact that I surround myself with numbskulls now, I shall die among numbskulls, and on my deathbed shall be surrounded by numbskulls who will not understand what I am saying ... Whom am I sleeping with these days ? Franz Kafka.

It always gets late with you. - Is that a compliment?

January. It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a year. January rained the moments down, and froze them in her memory: [...]Every human action seemed to yield a magic. January was a two-faced month, jangling like jester's bells, crackling like snow crust, pure as any beginning, grim as an old man, mysteriously familiar yet unknown, like a word one can almost but not quite define.

Life is a long failure of understanding ... a long, mistaken shutting of the heart.

one blow in anger [would] kill, probably, a child from aged two to eight. Those over eight would take two blows to kill.

One situation â?? maybe one alone â?? could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness.

Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.

Robert Walker as Bruno was excellent. He had elegance and humor, and the proper fondness for his mother

That wasn't a bad price for a first book. My agent upped it as much as possible. I was 27 and had nothing behind me. I was working like a fool to earn a living and pay for my apartment

The first person you should think of pleasing, in writing a book, is yourself. If you can amuse yourself for the length of time it takes to write a book, the publisher and the readers can and will come later.

The justice I have received, I shall give back.

The kiss became the narrowed center of the still point of the turning world, so that even the park was turning in comparison to the still peace at their lips.

The night was a time for bestial affinities, for drawing closer to oneself.

They were not friends. They didn't know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike. For an instant the wordless shock of his realization seemed more than he could bear.

This is what I like, sitting at a table and watching people go by. It does something to your outlook on life. The Anglo-Saxons make a great mistake not staring at people from a sidewalk table.

What was it to love someone, what was love exactly, and why did it end or not end? Those were the real questions, and who could answer them?

How was it possible to be afraid and in love... The two things did not go together. How was it possible to be afraid, when the two of them grew stronger together every day? And every night. Every night was different, and every morning. Together they possessed a miracle.