Writers Write Is All About Writing
Writers Write Is All About Writing
Patricia Highsmith

Literary Birthday – 19 January – Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith was born 19 January 1921, and died 4 February 1995.

Patricia Highsmith Quotes

  1. My New Year’s Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace.
  2. I can’t write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman.
  3. I think J.D. Salinger is correct in granting no interviews, and in making no speeches.
  4. I have no television – I hate it.
  5. 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 want them to interfere with mine.
  6. Honesty, for me, is usually the worst policy imaginable.
  7. 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.
  8. I like to work for four or five hours a day. I aim for seven days a week.
  9. The unconscious mind takes the germ of an idea and develops it, but usually this happens only when a writer has tried hard, and logically, to develop it himself. After he has given it up for a few hours, getting nowhere, a great advancement of the plot will pop into his head. I have been waked up in the night sometimes by a plot advancement or a solution of a problem that I had not even been dreaming about.
  10. My imagination functions much better when I don’t have to speak to people.

Patricia Highsmith was an American author, best known for her psychological thrillers. She wrote more than 20 novels, including Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt, and The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as numerous short stories. The Talented Mr Ripley was awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Scroll of the Mystery Writers of America. She wrote four more novels featuring Tom Ripley. Her psychological thrillers were adapted into more than 20 films. Highsmith also wrote on the craft of writing in her book, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction. She was awarded the French Grand Prix de Littérature Policière (1957) and the British Crime Writers Associations’ Silver Dagger (1964).

Read: 5 Bits Of Writing Advice From Patricia Highsmith

Source for image: Harper & Brothers, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Patricia-Highsmith-1962.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

Please click here for our Literary Birthday Calendar

Posted on: 19th January 2013
(6,393 views)