Surrealism Quotes

But surrealism is present in most of my pictures.

People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.

Surrealism runs through the streets.

Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.

The overintellectualization of surrealism can be a bromide. A dream interpreted is a deflated dream.

I guess Surrealism has a draw for me because it's an unknown world. It's a world of subconscious. Some things you can't really get your hands on very easily. Things that are kind of nebulous and they feel like they're not completely formed. You have to feel your way through that.

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.

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

Surrealism is based on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought.

The Limits Of Control is not surrealism, but it is an experiment in which expectations are deliberately removed: expectations for narrative form, for action in a film, for certain emotional content. We wanted to remove those things and see if we could still make a film that was a beautiful film experience, with deliberately removing things many people would expect.

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.

Perhaps because of this, many have looked at my practice in terms of science and technology, however, for me it is just as informed by Surrealism and mythology.

Surrealism is the magical surprise of finding a lion in a wardrobe, where you were 'sure' of finding shirts.

Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America.

Surrealism! What is Surrealism? In my opinion, it is above all a reawakening of the poetic idea in art, the reintroduction of the subject but in a very particular sense, that of the strange and illogical.

Perfect nonsense goes on in the world. Sometimes there is no plausibility at all

Surrealism does not allow those who devote themselves to it to forsake it whenever they like. There is every reason to believe that it acts on the mind very much as drugs do; like drugs, it creates a certain state of need and can push man to frightful revolts.

In an age of computer manipulation, surrealism has become banal, a shadow of its former self.

Drosselmeier had unwittingly exposed himself to an overdose of reality, and it had destroyed his reason.

The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood.

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.

My idea of a perfect surrealist painting is one in which every detail is perfectly realistic, yet filled with a surrealistic, dreamlike mood. And the viewer himself can't understand why that mood exists, because there are no dripping watches or grotesque shapes as reference points. That is what I'm after: that mood which is apart from everyday life, the type of mood that one experiences at very special moments.

Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.

Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.

The vice named surrealism is the immoderate and impassioned use of the stupefacient image or rather of the uncontrolled provocation of the image for its own sake and for the element of unpredictable perturbation and of metamorphosis which it introduces into the domain of representation; for each image on each occasion forces you to revise the entire Universe.

... a mysterious intersection of chance and attention that goes well beyond the existential surrealism of the 'decisive moment'.

Words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing... Music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice

The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.

THE ACT OF KILLING invents a new form of cinematic surrealism.

Of all the questions I'm asked, the most difficult is, "How does it feel to be famous?" Since I'm not, that question always catches me with a feeling of surrealism....I've got three kids and I've changed all their diapers, and when it's two o'clock in the morning and you're changing something that's sort of special delivery with one eye open and one eye shut you don't feel famous.

In the past things were either in your head (subjective, imaginary, fantasy) or else they were part of the outside world - cold, hard, concrete materialistic reality. If you want to look at it in terms of poetry, there was surrealism and objectivism. Now there's the veil of the virtual in between. The old opposition between inner and outer doesn't quite capture it, especially as it contains elements of both. It's real but not concrete.

Three men riding on a bicycle which has only one wheel, I guess that's surrealism.

The other day I was down by the Hudson River, and I see two nuns in full habit rollerblading down the street holding hands. And I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I get it. The world is surreal and beautiful. And everything is fine.'

Even as a teenager we got interested in the Beats, Dada, and Surrealism, and so on. What drew us to those was that their lives were their art. It wasn't something they did separately. Reading biographies of artists of that kind was what was fascinating to me, more than the stuff they made. We became convinced that life and art is really the same thing.

Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins. Do not forget to make proper arrangements for your last will and testament: speaking personally, I ask that I be taken to the cemetery in a moving van. May my friends destroy every last copy of the printing of the Speech concerning the Modicum of Reality.

Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.

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

It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself.

It was an honor to work with Samantha Morton on this Casablanca-esque, silent-film-esque, Americana photobooth Woolworth's hay day period piece of surrealism/ realism/ story time tell-tale-ism, black and white 35 mm film, washed in strange light, over this love hate tune, heartbreak song, life-goes-on lullaby, The Last Goodbye. It's a doorway into the future of the fatal past-tense. Get it?

I was interested in the ways that artists responded to totalitarianism - the Czech Jazz Section, Romanian absurdist theatre, Brecht's alienation effect. The anything-goes, anarchic qualities of jazz and Surrealism seemed to offer a way to cross some of the forbidden frontiers of Eastern Europe.

After realising my natural affinity towards surrealism several years ago I decided to study it's origins and definitions.

Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, whether verbally or in writing, or in any other way, the real process of thought. Thought's dictation, free from any control by the reason, independent of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.

What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.

I don't do drugs. I am drugs.

The activities of these parasites and degenerates gave rise to Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, Pointillism, Constructivism, Orphism, Surrealism, Dada, and also Impossibleism, Supersurrealism, Dynamic Double-Dog Realism, Ishkabibbleism, and Mama, which is like Dada only nicer.

Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.

I was thinking of the word Surrealistic . . . I don't think it should be used exclusively with my photographs. The meaning is close but I think my tendencies are more toward the whimsical or absurd. Surrealism is more connected with morbidity. From that I am very far away.

I loved surrealism and abstract painting, and anything related to those. I always thought painting was the highest form of art. What led me to drawing was seeing so much self-important, pretentious, conceptual-type art in university. I wanted to reject that by making quick, fun art.

I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.

Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.