Patricia Highsmith

She was seen by some of her contemporaries and acquaintances as misanthropic and cruel. She famously preferred the company of animals to that of people and once said, My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.

She loved cats. She bred about three hundred snails in her garden at home in Suffolk, England. Highsmith once attended a London cocktail party with a gigantic handbag that contained a head of lettuce and a hundred snails, who she said were her companions for the evening

She was a mean, hard, cruel, unlovable, unloving person, said acquaintance Otto Penzler. I could never penetrate how any human being could be that relentlessly ugly.

Other friends and acquaintances were less caustic in their criticism, however; Gary Fisketjon, who published her later novels through Knopf, said that she was rough, very difficult... but she was also plainspoken, dryly funny, and great fun to be around.

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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.
― Patricia Highsmith, New Year's Eve, 1947

But there was not a moment when she did not see Carol in her mind, and all she saw, she seemed to see through Carol. That evening, the dark flat streets of New York, the tomorrow of work, the milk bottle dropped and broken in her sink, became unimportant. She flung herself on her bed and drew a line with a pencil on a piece of paper. And another line, carefully, and another. A world was born around her, like a bright forest with a million shimmering leaves.
― Patricia Highsmith, Carol

Then Carol slipped her arm under her neck, and all the length of their bodies touched fitting as if something had prearranged it. Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale white flower, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven, she wondered.
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt