Quotes from Thomas Harris

It's fear, Jack. The man deals with a huge amount of fear.' Because he got hurt?' No, not entirely. Fear comes with imagination, it's a penalty, it's the price of imagination.

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.

It's hard to have anything isn't it? Rare to get it, hard to keep it. This is a damn slippery planet.

She didn't give a damn about some of them, but she had grown to learn that inattention can be a stratagem to avoid pain, and that it is often misread as shallowness and indifference.

Are you looking for sympathy? You'll find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis

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

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.

If I saw you everyday forever, I would remember this time.

Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.

Silence can mock.

We live in a primitive time—don't we, Will?—neither savage nor wise. Half measures are the curse of it. Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books.

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

We can only learn so much and live.

I'm not sure you get wiser as you get older, Starling, but you do learn to dodge a certain amount of hell.

He lives down in a ribcage in the dry leaves of a heart.

God's creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again.

The most stable elements, Clarice, appear in the middle of the periodic table, roughly between iron and silver. Between iron and silver. I think that is appropriate for you.

Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can't reduce me to a set of influences.

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.

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

Dr. Fell, do you believe a man could become so obsessed with a woman, from a single encounter? Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for her and find nourishment in the very sight of her? I think so. But would she see through the bars of his plight and ache for him?

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

What does he do, Clarice? What is the first and principal thing he does, what need does he serve by killing? He covets. How do we begin to covet? We begin by coveting what we see every day.

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