I have to speak my mind in a case like this, which is embarrassing in many ways — and it is a typical case — : it is certainly better if we separate an artist sufficiently far from his work as not immediately to take the man as seriously as his work. After all, he is merely the precondition for the work, the womb, the soil, sometimes the manure and fertilizer on which it grows, — and as such, he is something we have to forget about in most cases if we want to enjoy the work … We should avoid the confusion to which the artist is only too prone, out of psychological contiguity, as the English say, of thinking he were identical with what he can portray, invent and express.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Third Essay’ in On the Genealogy of Morality (ed. K. Ansell-Pearson & trans. C. Diethe). Cambridge University Press: New York, 2010, p. 71.
