“I could buy myself paper, a pen, a pencil and a brush…”

This language was present whenever I wanted it and wherever I was. I could live in Paris or in Stockholm, in London or New York, and I carried the language with me, however light I traveled…I could buy myself paper, a pen, a pencil and a brush and could create pictures whenever and wherever I wanted…That evening, in the spring of 1947, on the embankment of the Seine in Paris, at the age of thirty, I saw that it was possible to live and work in the world, and that I could participate in the exchange of ideas that was taking place all around, bound to no country.

—Peter Weiss, Vanishing Point