Tom Robbins Dismissing the Idea that Artists' Environments Necessarily Influence Their Work

You know the painter Jacques Louis David had a room, a studio, that overlooked the square where the major guillotine was located in Paris before the Revolution. And he would sit up there all day and watch heads being lopped off, blood flooding the cobblestones. Then he would turn to his easel and paint those very sweet portraits of members of the court. Now there was a man who was rejecting his environment.

--Tom Robbins, quoted in Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s,by Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory, University of Illinois Press, 1987, p. 225.