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

— Patricia Highsmith

My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.

— Patricia Highsmith

My story can move fast, as I can't, it can have a reasonable and perhaps perfect solution, as mine can't. A solution that is somehow satisfying, as my personal solution never can be.

— Patricia Highsmith

Obsessions are the only things that matter.

— Patricia Highsmith

Once a person has become detached from his possessions, his customary duties, his moments of solitude, where is he? What is he?

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

One interesting thing is that a stage is reached when nothing hurts anymore. Things cannot become any worse, finally, for the one who is really depressed.

— Patricia Highsmith

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

— Patricia Highsmith

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 surrounding loneliness, and its core was inadequacy. He was inadequate even in love.

— Patricia Highsmith

Perhaps it was a statement after all: I don’t want to die without knowing you. Do you feel the same way, Carol? She could have said the last question, but she could not have said all that went before it.

— Patricia Highsmith