Artistic Life Quotes

A person of large dreams does not allow other people’s opinion to damper his or her zestfulness. Overcoming fear of making an irreversible, lifetime mistake is the first step of living an artistic existence.

Kilroy J. Oldster

The artistic life is a long and lovely suicide precisely because it involves the negation of self; as Highsmith imagined herself as her characters, so Ripley takes on the personae of others and in doing so metamorphoses himself into a 'living' work of art. A return to the 'real life' after a period of creativity resulted in a fall in spirits, an agony Highsmith felt acutely. She voiced this pain in the novel via Bernard's quotation of an excerpt from Derwatt's notebook: 'There is no depression for the artist except that caused by a return to the self'.