Art & Creativity Quote by Edward Dahlberg

Confession is easier than self-congratulation, and Dahlberg is cruelly honest about why. Sin, in his formulation, has the clean lines of narrative: a transgression, a pulse of desire, a consequence. Virtue is a blur. The “virtuous act” won’t hold still in memory because it’s usually tangled up with ego, fear, and self-interest, the mixed motives we’d rather edit out. That’s the quote’s trapdoor: it flatters writers for their “candor” about vice while undercutting that candor as craft convenience.

Dahlberg, a modernist-era novelist with a taste for moral abrasion, isn’t only talking about ethics; he’s diagnosing literature. Readers trust sin on the page because it feels specific and embodied. Virtue often arrives as propaganda or self-mythology, the kind of thing that collapses into platitude the moment you try to dramatize it. His claim that we can’t even tell “whether it was the result of good or evil motives” reframes goodness as epistemological problem: the self is a bad witness in its own trial.

The subtext is a rebuke to moral posturing. If you can’t reliably account for your best moments, then your public righteousness is suspect. At the same time, he gives artists a backhanded permission slip: write the darkness, not because you’re brave, but because it’s legible. Sin is memorable; virtue is often just sin with better PR.