Surrealist Quotes

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

I wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art.

The surrealist thinks he has outstripped the whole of literary history when he has written (here a word that there is no need to write) where others have written "jasmines, swans and fauns." But what he has really done has been simply to bring to light another form of rhetoric which hitherto lay hidden in the latrines.

The Big Sleep' is an unsentimental, surrealist excitement in which most of the men in Hollywood's underworld are murdered and most of the women go for an honest but not unwilling private sleuth (Humphrey Bogart).

They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.

Realism and Naturalism rely mostly on the eye of the flesh.

Abstract, conceptual and surrealistic art rely mostly on the eye of the mind. Great works of art rely on the eye of contemplation, the eye of the spirit.

The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.

In nightlife you can do anything you want, because that is the fantasy life, the opposite of your daily life. Everything - except violence - is tolerated. And that is why it is so surrealistic in a way.

Really, I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself.

I tried sex once with a woman and that woman was Gala.

It was overrated. I tried sex once with a man and that man was the famous juggler Federico Garcia Lorca [the Spanish Surrealist poet]. It was very painful.

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.

I never knew I was a surrealist till Andre Breton came to Mexico and told me I was.

The Surrealist supernatural is a bit predictable but given the choice between supernatural and anything else, I would have no hesitation. Long live supernatural!

The surrealism of my pictures was nothing but the real made eerie by vision.

I was trying to express reality, for there is nothing more surrealist.

But all categories of art, idealistic or realistic, surrealistic or constructivist (a new form of idealism) must satisfy a simple test (or they are in no sense works of art): they must persist as objects of contemplation.

I got myself into a lovely little shall we say controversy with André Breton, by pointing out that the discipline of spontaneity, which he was asking his surrealist neophytes to adopt, was new for language but something that composers had been practicing for centuries.

I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane.

These people are honest to a fault, and their naivety has no peer but my own.

Chuck said, “Hey. How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” Cawley looked over at him. “I’ll bite. How many?” “Fish,” Chuck said and let loose a bright bark of a laugh.

I still love poetic imagery. I love the idea of using surrealist speak to generate lyrical content and I love the way English can be exciting in and of itself.

We know the surrealist solution: concrete irrationality, objective risk.

Poetry is the conquest, the only possible conquest, of the 'supreme position', 'a certain position of the mind from where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future... cease to be perceived in a contradictory sense.'

Surrealism is anathema for me. Because the surrealists made a joke of everything. And I consider life a tragedy.

To convulse reality from within, to demonstrate it as fractured spacing, became the collective result of all that vast range of techniques to which surrealist photographers resorted and which they understood as producing the characteristics of the sign.

In recent times, Surrealist painters have used descriptive illusionistic academic methods.

I believe in the pure Surrealist joy of the man who, forewarned that all others before him have failed, refused to admit defeat, sets off from watever point he chooses, along any other pat save a reasonable one, and arrives wherever he can.

The more I look at most of the art movements, it's all occultism, when you get down to it. The Surrealists were openly talking about being magicians.

In the Thirties, when I was in New York, I did the first surrealistic ballet in a show of mine.

I am not a surrealist. I am only a realist. All this group - surrealists - use my name. No, no, I am realist.

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly

There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.

Méret Oppenheim was a very erotic woman.

She also liked provocation, and if you could provoke surrealists at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, or similar Dadaist hangouts in Basel, where you could normally get away with these things, you were truly a provocateur.

All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. BOTH SIDES of the artist's personality must play their part.

Most artists are surrealists. ... always dreaming something and then they paint it.

I did exhibitions with the Surrealists (in Paris, in 1929) because their attitude revolted against 'art' and their attitude toward life itself was wise, as was Dada's.