I am less sympathetic with people who search for Freudian undertones in my art work. "Do you know what it symbolized when you painted that large red flower in the lower left-hand corner?" they ask in hushed tones. After I explain that the phone rang while I was holding my brush over the paper and, in leaping up to answer, I dropped a blob of red, which later was expanded into a flower because it looked less messy that way, they still act as if my impromptu posy were a dozen long-stemmed neuroses.

-- from "Look! I'm Framed." (1949)

But like Brady, Mather was no see-the-birdie, smile-please sort of photographer. He advertised "Ambrotypes, Porcelains, Double Position (superior)," but his manner and methods weren't always guaranteed to flatter the subject. When an early customer brought in her small son with a bow tie stretched from ear to ear, she complained, after seeing the photographs Mather took of the boy, "They're homely."

"Well, dammit, ma'am," Mather said. "Look at yourself and your husband. What can you expect of that union?"

--from The Great Olidorado (1959)

She looked at her wrist watch and saw that it was no help-- 4:13-- having stopped at that hour of the night when people often die, or would like to. More than once she had wanted to herself. She had had insomnia so badly she often read late and slept fitfully till nine or ten. Since giving up her regular job in the publishing firm two years before, to avoid seeing Alvin again, she had made herself punch a mental time clock every day, but in an out-of-kilter way, on a different shift, so that she wouldn't mesh with anyone's life but her own.

-- from Open the Door (1966)