Patricia Highsmith Quotes

59 quotes in 854 categories

• This is what I like, sitting at a table and watching people go by. It does something to your outlook on life. The Anglo-Saxons make…
• Everything human is alien to me.
• I can't write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman.
• 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…
• I have no television - I hate it.
• I have Graham Greene's telephone number, but I wouldn't dream of using it. I don't seek out writers because we all want to be alone.
• I was in New York. Hitchcock was in California. He rang me to make a report on his progress and said, I'm having trouble. I've…
• If people have bought something of mine, they know by now that I will decline writing it for the movies
• 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.…
• Robert Walker as Bruno was excellent. He had elegance and humor, and the proper fondness for his mother
• I think J.D. Salinger is correct in granting no interviews, and in making no speeches
• I think people often try to find through sex things that are much easier to find in other ways.
• I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial.
• I prefer to live in the country where it's quiet. Woody Allen movies there are dubbed into Italian.
• For neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not.
• Every man is his own law court and punishes himself enough.
• 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…
• I don`t set the alarm to get up. I get up when I feel like it.
• My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.
• I didn't hang around films. I don't know if I'd ever seen Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.

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