"A work of art has a big space. If for a moment we think of something else - and I won't dodge the question of Picasso's 'Guernica', or Pieter Bruegel's 'Hunters' - they're huge canvasses in which everything is allowed. Everything is painted in, everything is depicted, so that the viewer enters the whole world of that story or that tragedy, or that war or that hunt. It is quite different — and must be — to reportage."
January 1, 1970
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edna_O'Brien