Patricia Highsmith Quotes

“Bach for minor crises. Mozart for major ones.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995

“I can easily bear cold, loneliness, hunger and toothache, but I cannot bear noise, heat, interruprions, or other people.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995

“I want to write the saddest story ever written, a story that compresses the heart and brings tears to the eyes of every man from the lowest peasant to the highest genius. I will write it weeping such tears as were never wept at Troy or Carthage or at the Wailing Wall. The sadness will be a purge of my brain and heart, a hot iron to level and clean me, salt of my tears to purify my blood. My body will wring itself and writhe in pity. What story? Maybe mine.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995

“Basically, the reason I don’t like male homosexuals is because we basically disagree. Women, not men, are the most exciting and wonderful creations on the earth—and masculine homosexuals are mistaken and wrong!”
― Patricia Highsmith, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995

“And everyone loves me! (Except those who could give me a job!) But I find it impossible to believe that someone might not like me. She doesn’t. But it’s not true. Oh hell! I’d like to have fun, write, love, live, drink, laugh, read, and—worse!”
― Patricia Highsmith, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995

“We love either to dominate or to be bolstered up ourselves. And there is no love without some element of hate in it: in everyone we love, there is some quality we hate intensely.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995

“On April 14, 1941, she writes, “Je suis fait[e] de deux appétits: l’amour et la pensée [My appetite is twofold: I hunger for love and for thought].” How much experience is needed, she wonders, in order to write about it? To what extent does one side of this equation feed off the other?”
― Patricia Highsmith, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995

“I can’t think of anything more apt to set the imagination stirring, drafting, creating, than the idea—the fact—that anyone you walk past on the pavement may be a sadist, a compulsive thief, or even a murderer.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995