Patricia Highsmith

“Obsessions are the only things that matter.”

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

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

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

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

“Therese leaned closer toward it, looking down at her glass. She wanted to thrust the table aside and spring into her arms, to bury her nose in the green and gold scarf that was tied close about her neck. Once the backs of their hands brushed on the table, and Therese’s skin there felt separately alive now, and rather burning.”

“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.”

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

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

“The law was not society, it began. Society was people like himself and Owen and Brillhart, who hadn't the right to take the life of another member of society. And yet the law did. "And yet the law is supposed to be the will of society at least. It isn't even that. Or maybe it is collectively," he added, aware that as always he was doubling back before he come to a point, making things as complex as possible in trying to make them certain.”

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

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

“A few years ago, there were requests to me, Can we make this? I said that I have no rights. Contact the Hitchcock estate, which won't release it for a remake.”

“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 like to work for four or five hours a day. I aim for seven days a week.”

“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.”