255 Quotes by Patricia Highsmith

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

I should love to do a novel... about one abnormal character seeing present-day life, very ordinary life, yet arresting through it, abnormality, until at the end the reader sees, and with little reluctance, that he is not abnormal at all, and that the main character might as well be himself.

Perhaps God and the Devil danced hand in hand around every single electron.

But there was not a moment when she did not see Carol in her mind, and all she saw, she seemed to see through Carol. That evening, the dark flat streets of New York, the tomorrow of work, the milk bottle dropped and broken in her sink, became unimportant. She flung herself on her bed and drew a line with a pencil on a piece of paper. And another line, carefully, and another. A world was born around her, like a bright forest with a million shimmering leaves.

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.

The conversation seemed just as boring and forgettable as details of American history around 1805, for example.

He liked the fact that Venice had no cars. It made the city human. The streets were like veins, he thought, and the people were the blood, circulating everywhere.

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.