Patricia Highsmith Quotes
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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.
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My New Year’s Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace. (New Year's Eve, 1947)
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I have no television - I hate it.
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I think J.D. Salinger is correct in granting no interviews, and in making no speeches
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Every man is his own law court and punishes himself enough.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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I can't write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman.
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Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.
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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.
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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
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It always gets late with you. - Is that a compliment?
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If people have bought something of mine, they know by now that I will decline writing it for the movies
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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.
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I prefer to live in the country where it's quiet. Woody Allen movies there are dubbed into Italian.
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How easy it was to lie when one had to lie!
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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.
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I think people often try to find through sex things that are much easier to find in other ways.
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I know you have it in you, Guy," Anne said suddenly at the end of a silence, "the capacity to be terribly happy.
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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.
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Robert Walker as Bruno was excellent. He had elegance and humor, and the proper fondness for his mother
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I didn't hang around films. I don't know if I'd ever seen Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.
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Dusk was falling quickly. It was just after 7 P.M., and the month was October.
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Honesty, for me, is usually the worst policy imaginable.
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One situation – maybe one alone – could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness.
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Honestly, I don't understand why people get so worked up about a little murder!
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