Good evening, and welcome to a private showing of three paintings, displayed here for the first time. Each is a collectors' item in its own way - not because of any special artistic quality, but because each captures on a canvas, and suspends in time and space, a frozen moment of a nightmare.

It may be said with a degree of assurance that not everything that meets the eye is as it appears.

If you write beautifully, you write beautifully, that's all.

Ideas are born from what is smelled, heard, seen, experienced, felt, emotionalized.

It has forever been thus: So long as men write what they think, then all of the other freedoms - all of them - may remain intact. And it is then that writing becomes a weapon of truth, an article of faith, an act of courage.

There are weapons that are simply thoughts. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy.

(on being born on Christmas Day, 1924) I was a Christmas present that was delivered unwrapped.