From A Novel Sculpture of 1958

It all began when Bob Marcucci, the well-known gallery owner, was visiting friends. Driving up he saw an ambulance pulling away from the house next door, leaving a forlorn-looking youngster seated on the front steps. Marcucci walked over to ask what had happened. His questions were answered by the boy, who said that his name was Johnny and that his father had had a heart attack. Marcucci had a long talk with the boy...during which the hospital called to say that Johnny's father was all right.
From that fearful night, Johnny's career was launched.
Struck by the youngster's looks, Marcucci introduced Johnny to his partner, Peter De Angelis. The result of that meeting was a offer for a contract for Johnny.
For a youngster who had never had an art lesson in his life, indeed had never even been terribly interested in art, the offer came to Johnny as the surprise of his life. But with the normal curiosity of a fifteen-year-old, he agreed to a test.
He was terrible - and they signed him.
Les stood on the side of the hill. His shoulders were hunched forward and, because of the cold, he pulled the lapels of his raincoat tight around his chest and stumped his Clubmen up and down.
There was a good view; he could see almost everything: the town, the sea, the new council houses. And there was the factory, right beside the railway line.
Not a bad place to work, he thought to himself.
People always laughed at him when he told them that his job at the factory was to express a large volume with a minimum of material. But what these people never understood was that the job needed a lot of skill and responsibility.
No, it wasn't a bad place to work. Except that the pay wasn't too hot. And except for the foreman, who never had liked him.
 
"...The tensions of life today exist in the framework of an equally dynamic biological optimism."
"Yeah - bring on duh goils."
"My attachment to object-making leads me naturally towards the creation of the 'magic object', the personage, the creature, the human animal."
"Whadidyuh call me?"
"I search for what Levy-Bruhl called 'the plastic expression of a sacred collective imagery'."
'Look, bookworm - we're not connectin'."
"Tautness has its greatest value when it is expressed through forms which are potentially capable of being relaxed."
"Yar fulluh hot air."
"Gesture is to be found as much in the axes of forms as in the handling of surface...the mark of the artist goes all through whatever he makes."
"Get outtuh he-yar, willyuh?"
"I am convinced that to achieve an appropriate paraphrase of his own image may well be the most considerable achievement of which man will ever be capable."
"I tink I hearduhnuff fuh one night."