Best 90 quotes of Patricia Highsmith on MyQuotes

Patricia Highsmith

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    Patricia Highsmith

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

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    Patricia Highsmith

    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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    Patricia Highsmith

    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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    Patricia Highsmith

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

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    Patricia Highsmith

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

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    Patricia Highsmith

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

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    Patricia Highsmith

    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.

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    Patricia Highsmith

    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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    Patricia Highsmith

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

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    Patricia Highsmith

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

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    Patricia Highsmith

    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.

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    Patricia Highsmith

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

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    Patricia Highsmith

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

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    Patricia Highsmith

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

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    Patricia Highsmith

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

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    Patricia Highsmith

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

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    Patricia Highsmith

    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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    Patricia Highsmith

    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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    Patricia Highsmith

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

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    Patricia Highsmith

    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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    Patricia Highsmith

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

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    Patricia Highsmith

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

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    Patricia Highsmith

    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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    Patricia Highsmith

    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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    Patricia Highsmith

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

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    Patricia Highsmith

    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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    Patricia Highsmith

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

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    Patricia Highsmith

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

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    Patricia Highsmith

    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

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    Patricia Highsmith

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

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    Patricia Highsmith

    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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    Patricia Highsmith

    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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    Patricia Highsmith

    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

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    Patricia Highsmith

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

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    Patricia Highsmith

    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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    Patricia Highsmith

    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.

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    Patricia Highsmith

    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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    Patricia Highsmith

    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.

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    Patricia Highsmith

    And everything was made of paper: sentences, pardons, pleas, bad records, demerits, proof of guilt, but never, it seemed, proof of innocence. If there were no paper, Carter felt, the entire judicial system would collapse and disappear.

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    Patricia Highsmith

    And she did not have to ask if this was right, no one had to tell her, because this could not have been more right or perfect.

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    Patricia Highsmith

    And when all's said and done, the final comment will be (from me at least) so what? I'll live with my neuroses. I'll try to develop patience, with my handicapped personality. But I prefer to live with my neuroses and try to make the best of them.

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    Patricia Highsmith

    An Italian woman came out of the house, wiping her hands on her apron. 'Mr Greenleaf?' Tom asked hopefully. The woman gave him a long, smiling answer in Italian and pointed downward toward the sea. 'Jew,' she seemed to keep saying. 'Jew.

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    Patricia Highsmith

    At any rate, Therese thought, she was happier than she ever had been before. And why worry about defining everything?

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    Patricia Highsmith

    But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil. One had merely to look for a little of either to find it all, one had merely to scratch the surface. All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it, the male the female, the positive the negative... Nothing could be without its opposite bound up with it. Could space exist in a building without objects that stopped it? Could energy exist without matter, or matter without energy? Matter and energy, the inert and the active, once considered opposites, were now known to be one.

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    Patricia Highsmith

    Carol looked at her. "How do you become a poet?" "By feeling things - too much, I suppose," Therese answered conscientiously.

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    Patricia Highsmith

    Carol raised her hand slowly and brushed her hair back, once on either side, and Therese smiled because the gesture was Carol, and it was Carol she loved and would always love. Oh, in a different way now because she was a different person, and it was like meeting Carol all over again, but it was still Carol and no one else. It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell. Therese waited. Then as she was about to go to her, Carol saw her, seemed to stare at her incredulously a moment while Therese watched the slow smile growing, before her arm lifted suddenly, her hand waved a quick, eager greeting that Therese had never seen before. Therese walked toward her.

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    Patricia Highsmith

    De pronto le pareció, que el amor erótico y el amor romántico, no era nada más que una forma o varias formas del ego. Por consiguiente, lo que había que hacer era dirigir el ego de uno mismo hacia destinatarios que no fuesen personas, o hacia personas de las que uno no esperase nada. El amor podia ser puro, pero sólo si no era egoista.

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    Patricia Highsmith

    Do people always fall in love with things they can't have?' 'Always,' Carol said, smiling, too.

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    Patricia Highsmith

    Each person carries around in himself a terrible other world of hell and the unknown. It is an enormous pit reaching below the deepest crater of the earth, or it is the thinnest air far beyond the moon. But it is frightening and essentially “unlike” man as he knows himself familiarly, so we spend all our days living at the other antipodes of ourself.

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    Patricia Highsmith

    Fantasy, an unflagging optimism is necessary for a writer at all stages of this rough game. A kind of madness is therefore necessary, when there is every logical reason for a state of depression and discouragement. Perhaps the fact that I can react with utter gloom to this is what keeps me from being psychotic and keeps me merely neurotic. I am doing quite a good day's work today. But I am also aware of the madness that actually sustains me, and I am not made more comfortable or happy by it.