The artistic life is a long and lovely suicide precisely because it involves the negation of self; as High smith 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 High smith felt acutely. She voiced this pain in the novel via Bernard's quotation of an excerpt from Zermatt's notebook: 'There is no depression for the artist except that caused by a return to the self'.

Patricia Highsmith