Top 200 Patricia Highsmith Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “My imagination functions much better when I don’t have to speak to people.”

— Patricia Highsmith

2. “And no book, and possibly no painting, when it is finished, is ever exactly like the first dream of it.”

— Patricia Highsmith

3. “The first person you should think of pleasing, in writing a book, is yourself. If you can amuse yourself for the length of time it takes to write a book, the publisher and the readers can and will come later.”

— Patricia Highsmith

4. “Honestly, I don’t understand why people get so worked up about a little murder!”

— Patricia Highsmith

5. “What was it to love someone, what was love exactly, and why did it end or not end? Those were the real questions, and who could answer them?”

— Patricia Highsmith

6. “Obsessions are the only things that matter.”

— Patricia Highsmith

7. “Honesty, for me, is usually the worst policy imaginable.”

— Patricia Highsmith

8. “Everything human is alien to me.”

— Patricia Highsmith

9. “Every man is his own law court and punishes himself enough.”

— Patricia Highsmith

10. “I have no television – I hate it.”

— Patricia Highsmith

11. “It is then good to remember that artists have existed and persisted, like the snail and coelacanth and other changing forms of organic life since long before governments were dreamed of.”

— Patricia Highsmith

12. “Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.”

— Patricia Highsmith

13. “January. It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a year. January rained the moments down, and froze them in her memory:.”

— Patricia Highsmith

14. “Anticipation! It occurred to him that his anticipation was more pleasant to him than the experiencing.”

— Patricia Highsmith

15. “Oh, in a different way now, because she was a different person, and it was like meeting Carol all over again, but it was still Carol and no one else. It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell.”

— Patricia Highsmith

16. “I am the forever-seeking.”

— Patricia Highsmith

17. “If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful, or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture.”

— Patricia Highsmith

18. “I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and birdcalls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine.”

— Patricia Highsmith

19. “I’m going to enjoy what I’ve got as long as it lasts.”

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

21. “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.”

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

23. “I can’t write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman.”

— Patricia Highsmith

24. “I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial.”

— Patricia Highsmith

25. “For neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not.”

— Patricia Highsmith

26. “Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.”

— Patricia Highsmith

27. “Perhaps identity, like hell, was merely other people.”

— Patricia Highsmith

28. “Writing, of course, is a substitute for the life I cannot live, am unable to live.”

— Patricia Highsmith

29. “What a strange girl you are.” “Why?” “Flung out of space,” Carol said.”

— Patricia Highsmith

30. “This was the end of Dickie Greenleaf, he knew. He hated becoming Thomas Ripley again, hated being nobody, hated putting on his old set of habits again, and feeling that people looked down on him and were bored with him unless he put on an act for them like a clown, feeling incompetent and incapable of doing anything with himself except entertaining people for minutes at a time.”

— Patricia Highsmith

31. “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.”

— Patricia Highsmith

32. “I think friendships are the result of certain needs that can be completely hidden from both people, sometimes hidden forever.”

— Patricia Highsmith

33. “How was it possible to be afraid and in love... The two things did not go together. How was it possible to be afraid, when the two of them grew stronger together every day? And every night. Every night was different, and every morning. Together they possessed a miracle.”

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

35. “His stories were good because he imagined them intensely, so intensely that he came to believe them.”

— Patricia Highsmith

36. “You either let some event ruin your life or not. The decision is yours.”

— Patricia Highsmith

37. “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 a great mistake not staring at people from a sidewalk table.”

— Patricia Highsmith

38. “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 – what do you think? I think friendships are the result of certain needs that can be completely hidden from both people, sometimes hidden forever.”

— Patricia Highsmith

39. “Writing is a way of organizing experience and life itself.”

— Patricia Highsmith

40. “I don’t set the alarm to get up. I get up when I feel like it.”

— Patricia Highsmith

41. “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.”

— Patricia Highsmith

42. “That’s exactly where you’re wrong! Any kind of person can murder. Purely circumstances and not a thing to do with temperament! People get so far – and it takes just the least little thing to push them over the brink. Anybody. Even your grandmother. I know.”

— Patricia Highsmith

43. “But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil. One had merely to look for a little of either to find it all, one had merely to scratch the surface. All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it, the male the female, the positive the negative.”

— Patricia Highsmith

44. “The justice I have received, I shall give back.”

— Patricia Highsmith

45. “You say you love me however I am and when I curse. I say I love you always, the person you are and the person you will become.”

— Patricia Highsmith

46. “It always gets late with you. – Is that a compliment?”

— Patricia Highsmith

47. “The flowers you gave me – they died.”

— Patricia Highsmith

48. “Love was supposed to be a kind of blissful insanity.”

— Patricia Highsmith

49. “Her life was a series of zigzags. At nineteen, she was anxious.”

— Patricia Highsmith

50. “I have a definite psychosis in being with people. I cannot bear it very long.”

— Patricia Highsmith