When men take pleasure in feeling their minds elevated with strong drink and so indulge their appetite as to disorder their understandings neglect their duty as members of a family or civil society and cast off all regard to religion their case is much to be pitied.
They are much to be pitied who have not been given a taste for nature early in life.
When bad men combine the good must associate else they will fall one by one an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
Who is more to be pitied a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
The surrealists and the modern movement in painting as a whole seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.