“I do believe [San Francisco mural painter Hilaire] Hiller knows more about color than any man alive. He eats and drinks color. Himself he’s the color of color. He’s not just colorful, as we say of certain gay and charming birds, but he’s color itself. That means that he refracts light extraordinarily well. Sometimes he becomes a veritable aurora borealis.”

—Henry Miller, from The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, 1945.