Roland Hagenberg:  What is the obsession with chess by artists of your generation?

Dorothea Tanning:  It's more than a game.  It's a way of thinking.  You have to be clever in a warlike way.  You are a good chess player if you have a mean streak in you.  I think mean people make good chess players.

RH:  Is that the way you find out about other people?

DT:  No, but it's only that people who are too sweet cannot learn how to play chess.

     —from interview with Roland Hagenberg, "Dorothea Tanning," Art of Russia and the West, No. 1 (March 1989), p. 31.