As for mathematics, I gave it up for art when I realized there were no certainties in mathematics: you’re told that two parallels never meet, and then you learn that in a non-Euclidean geometry they can easily come together. I was disappointed and deeply disturbed, and I turned toward the certainties of feeling rather than those we are taught. If you accept inner certainties you become responsible for your own fate, you no longer depend on directives from the outside.

• 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.

To be an artist is a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become a murderer.