Thomas Harris Quotes

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.

Fear comes with imagination, it’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.

A census taker tried to quantify me once. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a big Amarone. Go back to school, little Starling.

The tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted.

When the Fox hears the Rabbit scream he comes a-runnin', but not to help.

Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn't it?

Nothing made me happen. I happened.

And be grateful. Our scars have the power to remind us that the past was real.

I think it's easy to mistake understanding for empathy - we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It's hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you.

We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the cafe curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we're frightened in the face of Doom.

One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.

I'm giving serious thought into eating yor wife” - Hannibal Lecter

Problem-solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure and we are born to it.

I have no interest in understanding sheep, only eating them.

How seldom we recognize the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home.

The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your critics, to get their approval.

In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. All the chambers are not lovely, light and high. There are holes in the floor of the mind, like those in a medieval dungeon floor - the stinking oubliettes, named for forgetting, bottle-shaped cells in solid rock with the trapdoor in the top. Nothing escapes from them quietly to ease us. A quake, some betrayal by our safeguards, and sparks of memory fire the noxious gases - things trapped for years fly free, ready to explode in pain and drive us to dangerous behavior.

Human emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors. Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself.

I collect church collapses, recreationally. Did you see the recent one in Sicily? Marvelous! The facade fell on sixty-five grandmothers at a special mass. Was that evil? If so, who did it? If he's up there, he just loves it, Officer Starling. Typhoid and swans - it all comes from the same place.

It occurred to Dr. Lecter in the moment that with all his knowledge and intrusion, he could never entirely predict her, or own her at all. He could feed the caterpillar, he could whisper through the chrysalis; what hatched out followed its own nature and was beyond him. He wondered if she had the .45 on her leg beneath the gown. Clarice Starling smiled at him then, the cabochons caught the firelight and the monster was lost in self-congratulation at his own exquisite taste and cunning.

I expect most psychiatrists have a patient or two they'd like to refer to me.

In her way, she was a hard one. Faith in any sort of natural justice was nothing but a night light; she knew of that. Whatever she did, she would end the same way with everyone does: flat on her back with a tube in her nose, wondering, "Is this all?

Over this odd world, this half the world that's dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.

Typhoid and swans - it all comes from the same place.

There is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named -- the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt.