• Question: Some of your works with the staircases are called No Exit. Seeing some of these cells, I think of Sartre's play No Exit, of people in a room together, in a purgatory, who are unable to understand each other.
• Louise Bourgeois: Yes, although 'No Exit' is also a ready-made sign seen all across America. The difference is that Jean-Paul Sartre was a pessimist. He said, 'Hell is other people.' But it is really the opposite. The hell is inside you, not with other people. The trouble is not with you if you come in and I start to scream. It is with me.