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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.

Thomas Harris

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Thomas Harris
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: April 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Jackson
Tennessee
William Thomas Harris III
Novel
Making
Understand
Anything
Find
Must
Writing

More quotes by Thomas Harris

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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?
Thomas Harris
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What does he do, Clarice? What is the first and principal thing he does, what need does he serve by killing? He covets. How do we begin to covet? We begin by coveting what we see every day.
Thomas Harris
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In her way, she was a hard one. Faith in any sort of natural justice was nothing but a night light she knew of that. Whatever she did, she would end the same way with everyone does: flat on her back with a tube in her nose, wondering, Is this all?
Thomas Harris
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I found, and find, the scrutiny of Dr. Lecter uncomfortable, intrusive, like the humming of your thoughts when they x-ray your head.
Thomas Harris
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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.
Thomas Harris
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I think it's easy to mistake understanding for empathy - we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It's hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you.
Thomas Harris
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Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.
Thomas Harris
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I would not have had that happen to you. Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.
Thomas Harris
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I am the dragon, and you call me insane.
Thomas Harris
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The tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted.
Thomas Harris
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Funerals often make us want sex-it's one in the eye for death.
Thomas Harris
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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.
Thomas Harris
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A census taker tried to quantify me once. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a big Amarone. Go back to school, little Starling.
Thomas Harris
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Before Me you are a slug in the sun. You are privy to a great Becoming and you recognize nothing. You are an ant in the after-birth.It is in your nature to do one thing correctly: before Me you rightly tremble. Fear is not what you owe Me, Lounds, you and the other pismires. You owe Me awe.
Thomas Harris
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The very air had screams smeared on it. He flinched from the noise in this silent room.
Thomas Harris
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What he has in addition is pure empathy and projection,” Dr. Bloom said. “He can assume your point of view, or mine – and maybe some other points of view that scare and sicken him. It’s an uncomfortable gift, Jack. Perception’s a tool that’s pointed on both ends.
Thomas Harris
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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.
Thomas Harris
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You will not persuade me with appeals to my intellectual vanity.
Thomas Harris
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Intense fear comes in waves the body can't stand it for long at a time.
Thomas Harris
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He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.
Thomas Harris