Patricia Highsmith(1921-1995)

Spent much of her later life in solitude on a 200-year old farmhouse near Locarno, Switzerland, surrounded by books and cats.

[on film versions of her novels]: Really, I don't mind too much if they take liberties with my plots, because they're trying to do something quite different from a book, and I think they have a right to change the story as much as they wish. I couldn't write a book with the idea in my mind that it was going to be a film. That would be like thinking of a statue when you're painting a picture.