After reading Bur gum, [Patricia Highsmith] wrote in her cashier that, like Kafka, she felt she was a pessimist, unable to formulate a system in which an individual could believe in God, government or self. Again like Kafka, she looked into the great abyss which separated the spiritual and the material and saw the terrifying emptiness, the hollowness, at the heart of every man, a sense of alienation she felt compelled to explore in her fiction. As her next hero, she would take an architect, 'a young man whose authority is art and therefore himself,' who when he murders, 'feels no guilt or even fear when he thinks of legal retribution'. The more she read of Kafka the more she felt afraid as she came to realize, 'I am so similar to him.

— Andrew Wilson

As some people turned to religion for comfort, so, High smith wrote in her notebook in September 1970, she took refuge in her belief that she was making progress as a writer. But she realized that both systems of survival were, however, fundamentally illusory. She wrote, she said, quoting Oscar Wilde because, 'Work never seems to me a reality, but a way of getting rid of reality'.

— Andrew Wilson

As the new year began, [Patricia Highsmith] felt completely paralyzed, incapable of reading or picking up the phone. 'I can feel my grip loosening on my self,' she wrote. 'It is like strength failing in the hand that holds me above an abyss.' She wished there was a more awful-sounding word for what she was feeling than simply 'depression'. She wanted to die, she said, but then realized that the best course of action would be to endure the wretchedness until it passed. Her wish was, 'Not to die, but not to exist, simply, until this is over'.

— Andrew Wilson

Early in 1967 High smith's agent told her why her books did not sell in paperback in America. It was, said Patricia Startle More, because they were 'too subtle', combined with the fact that none of her characters were likeable. 'Perhaps it is because I don't like anyone,' High smith replied. 'My last books may be about animals'.

— Andrew Wilson

If [Patricia Highsmith] saw an acquaintance walking down the sidewalk she would deliberately cross over to avoid them. When she came in contact with people, she realized she split herself into many different, false, identities, but, because she loathed lying and deceit, she chose to absent herself completely rather than go through such a charade. High smith interpreted this characteristic as an example of 'the eternal hypocrisy in me', rather her mental shape-shifting had its source in her quite extraordinary ability to empathize. Her imaginative capacity to subsume her own identity, while taking on the qualities of those around her - her negative capability, if you like - was so powerful that she said she often felt like her inner visions were far more real than the outside world. She aligned herself with the mad and the miserable, 'the insane man who feels himself one with all mankind, all life, because in losing his mind, he has lost his ego, his selfless', yet realized that such a state inspired her fiction. Her ambition, she said, was to write about the underlying sickness of this 'deal planet' and capture the essence of the human condition: eternal disappointment.

— Andrew Wilson

[Patricia Highsmith] was a figure of contradictions: a lesbian who didn't particularly like women; a writer of the most insightful psychological novels who, at times, appeared bored by people; a misanthrope with a gentle, sweet nature.

— Andrew Wilson

[Patricia Highsmith] was an extremely unbalanced person, extremely hostile and misanthropic and totally incapable of any kind of relationship, not just intimate ones. I felt sorry for her, because it wasn't her fault. There was something in her early days or whatever that made her incapable. She drove everybody away and people who really wanted to be friends ended up putting the phone down on her. It seemed to me as if she had to ape feelings and behavior, like Ripley. Of course sometimes having no sense of social behavior can be charming, but in her case it was alarming. I remember once, when she was trying to have a dinner party with people she barely knew, she deliberately leaned towards the candle on the table and set fire to her hair. People didn't know what to do as it was a very hostile act and the smell of singeing and burning filled the room.

— Andrew Wilson

[Patricia Highsmith] was overwhelmed by sensory stimulation - there were too many people and too much noise, and she just could not handle the supermarket. She continually jumped, afraid that someone might recognize or touch her. She could not make the simplest of decisions - which type of bread did she want, or what kind of salami? I tried to do the shopping as quickly as possible, but at the check-out she started to panic. She took out her wallet, knocked off her glasses, dropped the money on the floor, stuff was going all over the place.

— Andrew Wilson

People who fell in love at first sight, rushed home to their parents to tell them the good news and subsequently married were, [Patricia Highsmith] thought, retarded. Rather, a more honest appraisal of the nature of love positions it nearer to the horrors of mental illness. How else could you explain the fact that so many people were prepared to sacrifice the safety and coziness of their lives for the thrill of a new romance?

— Andrew Wilson

The artistic life is a long and lovely suicide precisely because it involves the negation of self; as High smith imagined herself as her characters, so Ripley takes on the personae of others and in doing so metamorphoses himself into a 'living' work of art. A return to the 'real life' after a period of creativity resulted in a fall in spirits, an agony High smith felt acutely. She voiced this pain in the novel via Bernard's quotation of an excerpt from Zermatt's notebook: 'There is no depression for the artist except that caused by a return to the self'.

— Andrew Wilson