For a while now I've had this feeling that there's something that I'm supposed to be doing or something that I'm supposed to contribute. I don't know what that is yet, but it's been plaguing me - like I've missed my calling somehow.
If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.
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.