“CABANNE: So it’s your moral position, more than your work, which was irritating?

DUCHAMP: There again, I had no position. I’ve been a little like Gertrude Stein. To a certain group, she was considered an interesting writer, with very original things . . .

CABANNE It’s a form of comparison between people of that period. By that, I mean that there are people in every period who aren’t ‘in.’ No one’s bothered by it. Whether I had been in or not, it would have been all the same. It’s only now, forty years later, that we discover things had happened forty years before that might have bothered some people – but they couldn’t have cared less then!”

(Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett, p. 17)