It's quite possible to be a thoroughly disreputable and objectionable painter, novelist, composer and produce great works of art. Wagner did it. T.S. Elliot was racist in a rather mean and nasty way. Burroughs had a lot of really rather psychopathic ideas - I knew him. A brilliant writer. But, you know, a moral degenerate in many ways.

J G Ballard, in an interview with Zulfikar Abbany.