quote attributed to Patricia Highsmith by u/Suspicious-Sound7338 at https://reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1ly0fei/guess_the_quote/

It is Patricia Highsmith, she said it in her diaries/notebooks cahiers, she had been keeping them all her life since 17 years olds://myoldtypewriter.com/2025/06/16/good-enough-is-very-fine-royal-kmg-tabulator-issue/

Patricia Highsmith's Cahiers by [[Jillian Hess]]

Jillian Hess noted that Patricia Highsmith uses the German word Keime, meaning "germ of an idea" in her cahiers to indicate ideas which might be used in her novels or short stories.

from Patricia Highsmith's diaries

this seems similar to Ralph Waldo Emmerson's journals/commonplaces where he collected interesting phrases for use in his writing. Here she's explicitly stating her desire to do this for her writing work.

The "Alone, in the quite." quote seems to mirror her appreciation and stated desire to be alone at home in the 1978 Good Afternoon interview.

from Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

Patricia Highsmith | American Author | Good Afternoon | 1978

Patricia Highsmith talks a bit about her writing process. She talks about her early family life and her current personal life, but doesn't mention her sexuality at all.

The tail end of the interview mentions the prevalence for murder within one's family. (When did this truism emerge within culture or at least within the crime space?)

quote is from Highsmith's Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

I love the concept of "slender ideas" as small, fleeting notes which might accumulate into something if written down. In saying "Close the notebook and think about it for a few days" Patricia Highsmith seems to be suggesting that one engage in diffuse thinking, passive digesting, or mulling rather than active or proactive thinking.

She also invokes the magic word "presto!" (which she exclaims) as if to indicate that magically the difficult work of writing is somehow no longer difficult. Many writers seem to indicate that this is a phenomenon, but never seem to put their finger on the mechanism of why it happens. Some seems to stem from the passive digestion over days with diffuse thinking, with portions may also stem from not starting from a blank page and having some material to work against instead of a vacuum.

From Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995 (Swiss Literary Archives)

Loving Highsmith (2022)<br /> https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15239466/

recommended by Patricia Highsmith's Cahiers by [[Jillian Hess]]