Quotes from Patricia Highsmith

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

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

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

For neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not.

Honesty, for me, is usually the worst policy imaginable.

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

When I am thickening my plots, I like to think 'What if ... What if ... ' Thus my imagination can move from the likely, which everyone can think of, to the unlikely-but-possible, my preferred plot.

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

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

I hope it will be set in California. In a way, I made a mistake, because a New Jersey policeman can't operate that way in New York. But in California, he can move between different counties.

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

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.

This is what I like, sitting at a table and watching people go by. It does something to your outlook on life. The Anglo-Saxons make a great mistake not staring at people from a sidewalk table.

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.

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

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

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?

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 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.

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.

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

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

Every man is his own law court and punishes himself enough.

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