Good stuff from Neil Gaiman:

If I were only allowed to read or enjoy art or listen to music made by people whose opinions and beliefs were the same as mine, I think the world would be a pretty dismal sort of a place. I love the work of many creators who self-avowedly believe or believed things that I consider to be 'fairly wretched', not to mention wrong-headed, lunatic, irresponsible or simply wrong. Worse yet: there are artists, actors, songwriters, authors, whose work I love, like or admire and who, biographers or historians tell us, actually did things that were utterly reprehensible. And worse even than that, there are all those things by Anonymous, who could have been or thought or done, well, anything, and we'll never know...

Ezra Pound was a fascist, an antisemite on a level that makes the Aryan Nation seem wishy washy, a traitor (or at best, a collaborator), and I'm very glad I got to read his poetry, and appreciate it and learn from it. I could list dozens more without breaking a sweat. Most, probably all, human beings get to do awful things and believe things that other human beings think they should be burned for believing, and they get to do and believe wonderful things too, and artists, writers, musicians, creators, actors, are nothing if not human beings.

The art isn't the artist, the poem isn't the poet; trust the tale, not the teller.

That's how I've always felt -- I never felt that I needed to applaud an actor's personal life, for instance, in order to enjoy watching them onscreen, or that it was necessary to admire a writer for the things they do (or don't do) apart from writing in order to enjoy their books.

It's one of the reasons I don't watch talk shows. I'm often disappointed to find that a favorite actor doesn't express him or herself well when speaking words that weren't written for them . . . I've always been able to suspend disbelief when I'm watching a movie--I never wonder how the special effects are done, for instance, I tend to believe it all. And also, I like to be able to believe that the actors are actually the persons that they're portraying, not acting at all. So why would I care about the personal life of the person playing a part?

It's a bit different, I think, with songwriters or poets, because they tend to be writing about themselves, for the most part; they're not (in general) "playing a part." So I can understand (to a point) being interested in their personal lives. And writers, maybe. But actors? Who cares?

Neil Gaiman - Neil Gaiman's Journal: in the wee small hours of the morning