Thomas Harris Quotes

Let me tell you about my day. I get up at 8 o'clock in the morning. At 8:30 am, I leave the house and I arrive at my office at 8:37. I stay in the office until 2 o'clock in the afternoon. I get in my Porsche and I'm home at 2:03 because the one-way streets make it faster for me to drive. And between 8:36 am and 2 pm, I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

It rubs the lotion on its skin. It does this whenever it is told.

I'll confess it is pleasant to look at you asleep. You're quite beautiful, Clarice.

The tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted.

You will not persuade me with appeals to my intellectual vanity.

Hannibal Lecter: We live in a primitive time - don't we, Will? - neither savage nor wise. Half measures are the curse of it. Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books.

He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.

Over this odd world, this half the world that's dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.

I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the cafe curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we're frightened in the face of Doom.

It occurred to Dr. Lecter in the moment that with all his knowledge and intrusion, he could never entirely predict her, or own her at all. He could feed the caterpillar, he could whisper through the chrysalis; what hatched out followed its own nature and was beyond him. He wondered if she had the .45 on her leg beneath the gown. Clarice Starling smiled at him then, the cabochons caught the firelight and the monster was lost in self-congratulation at his own exquisite taste and cunning.

There is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named -- the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt.

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.

I collect church collapses, recreationally. Did you see the recent one in Sicily? Marvelous! The facade fell on sixty-five grandmothers at a special mass. Was that evil? If so, who did it? If he's up there, he just loves it, Officer Starling. Typhoid and swans - it all comes from the same place.

In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. All the chambers are not lovely, light and high. There are holes in the floor of the mind, like those in a medieval dungeon floor - the stinking oubliettes, named for forgetting, bottle-shaped cells in solid rock with the trapdoor in the top. Nothing escapes from them quietly to ease us. A quake, some betrayal by our safeguards, and sparks of memory fire the noxious gases - things trapped for years fly free, ready to explode in pain and drive us to dangerous behavior.

What do you look at while you’re making up your mind? Ours is not a reflective culture, we do no raise our eyes up to the hills. Most of the time we decide the critical things while looking at the linoleum floor of an institutional corridor, or whispering hurriedly in a waiting room with a television blatting nonsense.

I found, and find, the scrutiny of Dr. Lecter uncomfortable, intrusive, like the humming of your thoughts when they x-ray your head.

In making friends, she was wary of people who foster dependency and feed on it. She had been involved with a few--the blind attract them, and they are the enemy.

It occured to Starling how much Roden would benefit from an elbow smash in the hinge of his jaw.

He sees very clearly - he damn sure sees through me. It's hard to accept that someone can understand you without wishing you well. At Starling's age it hadn't happened to her much.

You cant reduce me to a set of influences.

Intense fear comes in waves; the body can't stand it for long at a time.

The advantage of beating a mute is he can't tell on you.

Because it's his bad luck to be the best.

Funerals often make us want sex-it's one in the eye for death.

I have no interest in understanding sheep, only eating them.

It's hard to have anything isn't it? Rare to get it, hard to keep it. This is a damn slippery planet.

How seldom we recognize the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home.

Back at his chair he cannot remember what he was reading. He feels the books beside him to find the one that is warm.

It's hard... to shake off something that's already under your skin.

Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn't it?

It's fear, Jack. The man deals with a huge amount of fear.' Because he got hurt?' No, not entirely. Fear comes with imagination, it's a penalty, it's the price of imagination.

You know how cats do. They hide to die. Dogs come home.

And your dinner for the orchestra officials." "Haven't you ever had people coming over and no time to shop? You have to make do with what's in the fridge, Clarice. May I call you Clarice?

One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.

Nothing made me happen. I happened.

Evil's just destructive? Then storms are evil, if it's that simple. And we have fire, and there there's hail. Underwriters lump it all under 'Acts of God.

But the face on the pillow, rosy in the firelight, is certainly that of Clarice Starling, and she sleeps deeply, sweetly, in the silence of the lambs.

One quality in a person doesn't rule out any other quality. They can exist side by side, good and terrible. Socrates said it a lot better.

Human emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors. Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself.

Good-bye Clarice. Will you let me know if ever the lambs stop screaming?" "Yes." Pembry was taking her arm. It was go or fight him. "Yes," she said. "I'll tell you." "Do you promise?""Yes.

Problem-solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure and we are born to it.

Typhoid and swans - it all comes from the same place.

Life's too slippery for books, Clarice; anger appears as lust, lupus presents as hives.

I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti

The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your critics, to get their approval.

Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.

There is no murder. We make murder, and it matters only to us.