Quotes from Patricia Highsmith

If the writer thinks about his material long enough, until it becomes a part of his mind and wakes up thinking about it- then at least when he starts to work, it will flow out as if by itself.

I appreciate your sentiments but I do not waste my time punching people in the nose. If I really don't like somebody, I kill him. – Victor Van Allen

If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful, or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture.

Do people always fall in love with things they can't have?" "Always," Carol said

Do people always fall in love with things they can't have?' 'Always,' Carol said, smiling, too

Hate had begun to paralyze his thinking, he realized, to make little blind alleys of the roads that logic had pointed out to him in New York.

An Italian woman came out of the house, wiping her hands on her apron. 'Mr Greenleaf?' Tom asked hopefully. The woman gave him a long, smiling answer in Italian and pointed downward toward the sea. 'Jew,' she seemed to keep saying. 'Jew.

An artist does things naturally, without effort. Some power guides his hand. A forger struggles, and if he succeeds, it is a genuine achievement.

Then he said, "That's a long way from stage designing, isn't it." She nodded. "Quite a long way." She started to ask him if he intended to do any work pertaining to the atom bomb, but she didn't, because what would it matter if he did or didn't?

He did look like an Italian of the worse type, though Vic didn't think he was, and it was an insult to the Italian race to assume that he was. He resembled no particular race, only an amalgamation of the worst elements of various Latin peoples. He looked as if he had spent all his life dodging blows that were probably aimed at him for good reason.

Carol looked at her, as if really seeing her for the first time that evening, and under her eyes that went from her face to her hands in her lap, Therese felt like a puppy Carol had bought at a roadside kennel, that Carol had just remembered was riding beside her.

It was the seventh or eighth floor, she couldn't remember which. A streetcar crawled past the front of the hotel, and people on the sidewalk moved in every direction, with legs on either side of them, and it crossed her mind to jump.

The headwaiter said something to her in the foyer, and she told him, "I'm looking for somebody," and went on to the doorway. She stood in the doorway, looking over the people at the tables in the room where a piano played.

How indifferent he was to Carol after, all, Therese thought. She felt he didn't see her, as he sometimes hadn't seen figures in rock or cloud formations when she had tried to point them out to him.

Writing is a craft and needs constant practice.

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.

Though all we have known is only a beginning.

Oh, in a different way now, because she was a different person, and it was like meeting Carol all over again, but it was still Carol and no one else. It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell.

You either let some event ruin your life or not. The decision is yours.

Happiness was a little like flying a kite, she thought, like being a kite. It depended on how much one let the string out-

the sense that everyone was incommunicado with everyone else and living on an entirely wrong plane, so that the meaning, the message, the love, or whatever it was that each life contained, never could find its expression.

and wished with all her power to wish anything, that the woman would simply continue her last words and say, "Are you really so glad to have met me? Then why can't we see each other again? Why can't we even have lunch together today?" Her voice was so casual, and she might have said it so easily.

Sunlight came through the windows slowly, like something liquid pouring between the red curtains on to the rug. The sunlight was like an arpeggio that Tom could almost hear -- this time Chopin, perhaps.

The way to see the world was to see it drunk. Everything was created to be seen drunk.