Quotes About Surrealist

#1. 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.

Henry Moore

#2. I like Dali and Magritte. I also like the Scottish artist John Byrne, another surrealist.

Billy Connolly

#3. I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.

Kenneth Koch

#4. The first piece I ever collected was a Roy Lichtenstein: a sculpture called 'Surrealist Head II'. There was a waiting list. I remember Steve Martin wanted one, and I wanted one. I got the 'Surrealist Head', and I was thrilled.

Jeff Koons

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

Andre Breton

#6. 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.

Andre Breton

#7. I was both charmed and moved by Midday with Buuel, Mexican filmmaker and writer Claudio Isaac's personal and very poetic recollection of his friendship with his mentor, the Spanish surrealist Luis Buuel.

C.M. Mayo

#8. 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.

Salvador Dali

#9. 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.

Brassai

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

Frida Kahlo

#11. Logic, order, truth, reason, we consign them all to the oblivion of death," said one Surrealist manifesto. We must "cultivate the hatred of intelligence," said the leader of the Futurists, Filippo Marinetti, an artist hailed by Mussolini as the John the Baptist of Fascism.17

Leonard Peikoff

#12. We could say that Romanian Onirisme was born from painting and not from surrealist literature. The visual is primordial. Dimov said, 'Dreams are not a source, but a canon, a legislative model.'

Dumitru Tepeneag

#13. Some of the French surrealists at the beginning of the war had come over to New York and they brought out this magazine. It was a big, glossy magazine full of surrealist things.

Kenneth Koch

#14. 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.

Rosalind E. Krauss

#15. '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).

Manny Farber

#16. 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.

Jeff Tweedy

#17. Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.

Eugene Ionesco

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

Peggy Guggenheim

#19. Lady Gaga has a lot of energy, and that is fantastic, but she is using old surrealist images.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

#20. There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.

Thomas Pynchon

#21. [David] Salle's earlier work had been marked by a kind of spaciousness, sometimes an emptiness, such as surrealist works are prone to. But here everything was condensed, impacted, mired. The paintings were like an ugly mood.

Janet Malcolm

#22. When I was an adolescent, I abandoned my country at 23 years to come to Paris to know Andre Breton, the 'Pope of Surrealism.' And for three years, I was there working with him being a surrealist.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

#23. What the fuck are you talking about?" I asked, wondering if I was in some crazy surrealist movie, wandering from telepathic sheriffs to homosexual assassins, to nympho lady Masons, to psychotic pirates, according to a script written in advance by two acid-heads and a Martian humorist.

Robert Shea

#24. My son got me into 'The Mighty Boosh.' I just love that surrealist humour.

David Morrissey

#25. Our Onirisme movement was a synthesis between the Romantic Fantastique and Surrealism. Dimov and I rejected automatic writing. We loved surrealist painters: Chirico, Magritte, Tanguy and especially Brauner (also a Romanian), who never respected the laws that Breton imposed in his manifests.

Dumitru Tepeneag

#26. It's very hard to say I'm surrealist. It's like saying I'm poetic. It's not something you want necessarily to be aware of.

Michel Gondry

#27. We can sum up the surrealist distinction between 'literature' and 'poetry' by saying where the former is artificial, fictive and elusive, the latter is natural, real, direct and spontaneous.

Michael Richardson

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

Frida Kahlo

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

Hans Arp

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

Andre Kertesz

#31. [Who are the artists you admire, Surrealist or otherwise?]
Remedios Varo, Max Ernst, Charlotte Salomon, Goya, Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley is not so much about the impossible as he is about freaks and deformities, but those are interesting to me too.

Audrey Niffenegger

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

Susan Sontag

#33. The shifting sands of the world ... show how much the surrealists were drawn towards an interrogation of what reality actually is. Unlike fabulists of whatever hue, there is a materiality in surrealist writing that resolutely keeps it, one might say, 'down to earth'.

Michael Richardson

#34. If asked which words one associated with the Sahara, only the most dedicated surrealist might be expected to offer "whale".

Eamonn Gearon

#35. I would love to have been a painter in the tradition of the surrealist painters who I admire so much.

J.G. Ballard

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

Frida Kahlo

#37. To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.

Rene Magritte

#38. The camera can be lenient; it is can also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste.

Susan Sontag

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

Henri Michaux

#40. Most artists are surrealists

Dong Kingman

#41. But in those first hours after you take it, your brain is tuned in like nothing you can imagine. Eyes like the Hubble telescope, sensing light that's not even on the spectrum. You might be able to read minds, make time stop, cook pasta that's exactly right every time.

David Wong