Alain Jouffroy:  Do you know that your work is splendid, violent, profound, or do you sometimes doubt it?  

Dorothea Tanning: ...Doubt is constant.  It's like choice:  every second of your life you're choosing.  Millions of choices every day.  Millions of rejections.  Not with instinct, but with the mind.  For the poet at least, there is delight and disappointment, both ambivalent and capricious as the winds. They can destroy us or blow us to the heights.  In either case we need a weapon:  humor.  My nerves may be rooted in tragedy but their ends die laughing.  My nightmares have ironic linings, otherwise, how could I bear the quotidian?  What more can I tell you, Alain.  One is never wholly satisfied, but it's wonderful to try.  One thing is immutable and unambiguous, though:  you can get very close.  You can come within reach of heights and depths.  It's a lot.

     --from “Interview with Dorothea Tanning" in Dorothea Tanning, retrospective exhibition catalogue, Malmö, Sweden: Malmö Konsthall, 1993, pp. 65, 67.   This interview was originally published as "Questions pour Dorothea Tanning entretien avec Alain Jouffroy, Mars 1974,” in Dorothea Tanning: Oeuvre, retrospective exhibition catalogue, Paris: Centre National D'Art Contemporain, 1974.