Lives.

Botticelli, Smeralda Bandinelli (detail), 1480

The only artists I have ever known who are perfectly delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist in simply what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry they dare not realize.

Oscar Wilde