Success Quote by Patricia Highsmith

Name-dropping usually signals social leverage; Highsmith turns it into a moral alibi. Having Graham Greene's phone number should be a key into the literary salon, a shortcut to kinship. Instead she treats it like contraband: proof of proximity to greatness that must not be spent. The first clause flashes access, the second withdraws it. That snap of self-correction is the point. Highsmith is performing restraint as a kind of integrity, but also as self-protection.

The subtext is less reverent than wary. "I wouldn't dream of using it" isn't modesty so much as a refusal of the needy, networking impulse that turns art into a social transaction. Writers, in her view, are not colleagues to be collected; they're solitary animals. The line "we all want to be alone" reads like a bleak insider truth dressed up as etiquette. If you call Greene, you risk becoming a fan, a petitioner, a distraction. Worse, you risk becoming ordinary: someone who treats literature like an industry of contacts.

Context matters: Highsmith cultivated distance and mistrust, personally and aesthetically. Her fiction is full of people who watch, misread, and intrude; intimacy often arrives as menace. So the quote doubles as an artistic creed. Solitude isn't a quirk, it's the condition for control - over sentences, over self, over the private compulsions that her work metabolizes into suspense. In one neat pivot, she punctures the romance of the writerly community and insists on the colder, truer engine of the job: isolation, chosen and defended.