Patricia Highsmith

Novelist

1921-01-19

Quotes by Patricia Highsmith

• The law was not society, it began. Society was people like himself and Owen and Brillhart, who hadn't the right to take the life of another member of society. And yet the law did. And yet the law is supposed to be the will of society at least. It isn't even that. Or maybe it is collectively, he added, aware that as always he was doubling back before he come to a point, making things as complex as possible in trying to make them certain.

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• She had seen just now what she had only sensed before, that the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what she and Carol had together seemed no longer love or anything happy but a monster between them, with each of them caught in a fist.

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• I had depressing thoughts that the theme, even though I had thought of it, was better than I was as a writer. Henry James or Thomas Mann could easily write it, but not I. 'I'm thinking of writing it from the point of view of someone at the hotel who observes her,' I said, but this did not fill me with much hope. Then my friend, who is not a writer, suggested I try it from the omniscient author's point of view.

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• What immense satisfaction it must be to fashion a story like [Maupassant's]! One must say 'fashion' because it is not merely writing, but massing and cutting away like a sculptor, chiseling lean and clear. And to put one's work confidently in the crucible of Time; to know that in six perfect pages is the finest form of one's idea: This satisfaction is the only true reward of the artist, and this his highest possible joy on Earth.

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• And she did not have to ask if this was right, no one had to tell her, because this could not have been more right or perfect.

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• I have been sadder than any man could be: for nothing in the world was made for me.

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• Each person carries around in himself a terrible other world of hell and the unknown. It is an enormous pit reaching below the deepest crater of the earth, or it is the thinnest air far beyond the moon. But it is frightening and essentially —unlike— man as he knows himself familiarly, so we spend all our days living at the other antipodes of ourself.

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• What chance combination of shadow and sound and his own thoughts had created it?

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• But there were too many points at which the other self could invade the self he wanted to preserve, and there were too many forms of invasion: certain words, sounds, lights, actions his hands or feet performed, and if he did nothing at all, heard and saw nothing, the shouting of some triumphant inner voice that shocked him and cowed him.

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• One situation – maybe one alone – could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness.

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• Life is a long failure of understanding, a long, mistaken shutting of the heart.

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• I read, write and create. I must lose myself in work, so that there is no space for the other/anything else.

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• Fantasy, an unflagging optimism is necessary for a writer at all stages of this rough game. A kind of madness is therefore necessary, when there is every logical reason for a state of depression and discouragement. Perhaps the fact that I can react with utter gloom to this is what keeps me from being psychotic and keeps me merely neurotic. I am doing quite a good day's work today. But I am also aware of the madness that actually sustains me, and I am not made more comfortable or happy by it.

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• Outside, under the marquee of the hotel, he stood a moment as he did each night beneath the marquee of the Hotel Hyperion, while he decided what direction to take, what to do. And suddenly, realizing it was not the Hotel Hyperion, that the circumstances were quite different, he felt loneliness spring up like a dark forest all around him. The odd thing was, he felt no impulse to hurry after her, to find her somehow. What would he have to offer her except the history of weakness, loneliness, and inadequacy, the decline and fall of himself? He himself was the core of the loneliness around him, and its core was inadequacy. He was inadequate even in love.

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• one blow in anger [would] kill, probably, a child from aged two to eight. Those over eight would take two blows to kill.

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• I have a definite psychosis in being with people. I cannot bear it very long.

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• I do not understand people who like to make noise; consequently I fear them, and since I fear them, I hate them.

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• Finally, Carol said in a tone of hopelessness, Darling, can I ask you to forgive me? The tone hurt Therese more than the question. I love you, Carol. But do you see what it means?

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• I know you have it in you, Guy, Anne said suddenly at the end of a silence, the capacity to be terribly happy.

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• What immense satisfaction it must be to fashion a story like [Maupassant's]! One must say 'fashion' because it is not merely writing, but massing and cutting away like a sculptor, chiseling lean and clear. And to put one's work confidently in the crucible of Time; to know that in six perfect pages is the finest form of one's idea: This satisfaction is the only true reward of the artist, and this his highest possible joy on Earth.

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