Patricia Highsmith Quotes

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

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...

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 d...

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...

I have a definite psychosis in being with people. I cannot bear it very long.

Outside, under the marquee of the hotel, he stood a moment as he did each night beneath the marquee of the Hotel Hyperion, while he decided what direction to take, what to do. And suddenly, realizing...

Once a person has become detached from his possessions, his customary duties, his moments of solitude, where is he? What is he?

She probably had all the time in the world, Therese thought, probably did nothing all day but what she felt like doing.

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

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

What immense satisfaction it must be to fashion a story like [Maupassant's]! One must say 'fashion' because it is not merely writing, but massing and cutting away like a sculptor, chiseling lean and c...

She knew what bothered her at the store...It was that the store intensified things that had always bothered her, as long as she could remember. It was the pointless actions, the meaningless chores tha...

The taste of Scotch, though Guy didn’t much care for it, was pleasant because it reminded him of Anne. She drank Scotch, when she drank. It was like her, golden, full of light, made with careful art.

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

What else mattered except being with Carol, anywhere, anyhow?

She thought of people she had seen holding hands in movies, and why shouldn't she and Carol?

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...

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 mons...

My story can move fast, as I can't, it can have a reasonable and perhaps perfect solution, as mine can't. A solution that is somehow satisfying, as my personal solution never can be.

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