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.”

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

“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.”

“He could feel the belligerence growing in Freddie Miles as surely as if his huge body were generating a heat that he could feel across the room.”

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

“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 read, write and create. I must lose myself in work, so that there is no space for the other/anything else.”

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

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

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

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

“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 had depressing thoughts that the theme, even though I had thought of it, was better than I was as a writer. Henry James or Thomas Mann could easily write it, but not I. 'I'm thinking of writing it from the point of view of someone at the hotel who observes her,' I said, but this did not fill me with much hope. Then my friend, who is not a writer, suggested I try it from the omniscient author's point of view.”

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

“One interesting thing is that a stage is reached when nothing hurts any more. Things cannot become any worse, finally, for the one who is really depressed.”

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

“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?”

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

“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.”