Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
Artists who create public personas often make unreliable witnesses to their own past because they curate their image.
In plain terms
Artists with big public images might not remember their past accurately.
What can you take from it?
Public personas can distort how artists remember their own lives.

Where it applies

  • biographies
  • interviews
  • art history

Putting it to work

  • verify sources
  • question public narratives
  • study primary docs

Questions to consider

  • Can we trust artists' stories?
  • How does persona affect memory?

Another view

Sometimes their persona is more important than the truth.

More from Wilfrid Sheed

  1. The odds on any intelligent person having an unhappy childhood are better than fair, and the odds on a sad ending are practically off the board.

    Permalink to quote #20
  2. In modern American style, his job, not his past, defined him.

    Permalink to quote #22
  3. Happy the man with a book-length grievance - and rare. Each of these books contains one possible magazine article surrounded by more padding than an offensive …

    Permalink to quote #19

Related quotes

  1. I have regarded you, not as a novelist, but as an historian; for it is my considered opinion, unshaken at 85, that records of fact are not history. They are on…

    Upton SinclairUpton Sinclair quote #37
  2. Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic an…

    James JoyceJames Joyce quote #1
  3. Klopstock was questioned regarding the meaningof a passage in his poem. He replied, 'God and I both knew what it meant once; now God alone knows.'

    Cesare LombrosoCesare Lombroso quote #1