Patricia Highsmith Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

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?

I have no television - I hate it.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.

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

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

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

The justice I have received, I shall give back.

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

How easy it was to lie when one had to lie!

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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