“I was walking just a few steps ahead of my grandmother when I went up to a man with dark sunglasses sitting on a bench. I tugged him on the coat, and told him excitedly to look at the sailboats and the white waves and flags waxing in the breeze. He said to me, ‘Sonny, can’t you read?’ I couldn’t, but I said, ‘Yes, I can read’. He pointed to a button on the lapel of his black overcoat and said, ‘Read this’. I couldn’t understand what was written on the button. As he started spelling out the word blind, my grandmother came up and grabbed my hand and said, ‘Can’t you see this man is blind?’. [...] I think of this incident many times. It has become a kind of metaphor in my mind. I think very often I am trying to show the view to a blind man and can never show it enough. And it applies to me as much as to anyone else.”
Malcolm Morley cited in Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Malcolm Morley: Itineraries, London 2001, p. 13
