Sam at Golden Rule Jones is writing of late about loving Iris Murdoch. He quotes her:
Plato remarks in The Republic that bad characters are volatile and interesting, whereas good characters are dull and always the same. This certainly indicates a literary problem. It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness.
This reminds me a provocative remark I once stumbled on in which Simone Weil claimed the opposite: that in art, evil is boring and good interesting. I have never been able to track down the source of the quotation, and at this point I’ve lost the quotation itself. Does anyone know it?