Quotes from Patricia Highsmith

What a strange girl you are. Why Flung out of space, Carol said.

Not like the same face on the passing bus that seems to speak, that is seen once and at least is gone forever

Ayer, se dijo, o se dejó entender, que el camino que he escogido me llevaría a hundirme en las profundidades del vicio y la degeneración humanas. Sí, me he hundido bastante desde que me apartaron de ti

Writing, of course, is a substitute for the life I cannot live, am unable to live. All life, to me, is a search for the balanced diet, which does not exist. For me. Alas, I am twenty-nine, and I cannot stand more than five days of the life I have invented as the most ideal. May 17, 1950

Are you tired? Carol asked calmly. The question seemed not of now but of always.

All right, he may not be queer. He's just a nothing, which is worse. He isn't normal enough to have any kind of sex life, if you know what I mean.

And she wondered, as she had often wondered before, if Richard liked her only because she was more sympathetic with his ambitions than anyone else he happened to know now, and because he felt her criticism was a help to him.

Why I love you Patricia Highsmith, will forever remain a Freudian enigma.

I like to avoid labels. It is American publishers who loved them.

Persistently, I have a vision of a house in the country with the blond wife whom I adore, with the children whom I adore, on the land and with the trees I adore. I know this will never be, yet will be partially, that tantalizing measure (of a man) which leads me on.

I'm still an old pearl in a new oyster.

My mistake was in speaking to him. My mistake was in telling a stranger my private business.

If I had been blind, I could have got married, I am pretty sure.

I can easily bear cold, loneliness, hunger and toothache, but I cannot bear noise, heat, interruprions, or other people.

Bach for minor crises. Mozart for major ones.

The first person you should think of pleasing, in writing a book, is yourself. If you can amuse yourself for the length of time it takes to write a book, the publisher and the readers can and will come later.

Therein lay the flaw, and the flaw of life itself. Life is a long failure of understanding, Mrs Palmer thought, a long mistaken shutting of the heart.

He would rather the man be a pervert than a police officer

The moral is: stay alone. Any idea of any close relationship should be imaginary, like any story I am writing. This way no harm is done to me or to any other person.

De pronto le pareció, que el amor erótico y el amor romántico, no era nada más que una forma o varias formas del ego. Por consiguiente, lo que había que hacer era dirigir el ego de uno mismo hacia destinatarios que no fuesen personas, o hacia personas de las que uno no esperase nada. El amor podia ser puro, pero sólo si no era egoista.

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.

Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.

And no book, and possibly no painting, when it is finished, is ever exactly like the first dream of it.

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