255 Quotes by Patricia Highsmith

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.

One’s just supposed to conform. I know what they’d like, they’d like a blank they could fill in. A person already filled in disturbs them terribly.

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

Nothing was true but the fatigue of life and the eternal disappointment.

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.

In the middle of the block, she opened the door of a coffee shop, but they were playing one of the songs she had heard with Carol everywhere, and she let the door close and walked on. The music lived, but the world was dead. And the song would die one day, she thought, but how would the world come back to life? How would its salt come back?

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?

Society’s law was lax compared to the law of conscience.

I think there’s a definite reason for every friendship just as there’s a reason why certain atoms unite and others don’t – certain missing factors in one, or certain present factors in the other.