Surrealist Quotes

• 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

  Mean, Remembrance, Mind

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• Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.

  Salvador Dali

  Photography, Vision, Shackles

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

  Frida Kahlo

  Dream, Reality, Portraits

  Frida Kahlo (1978). “Frida Kahlo, 1910-1954: an exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago”

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

  Anais Nin

  Ordinary, Doe, True Happiness

  The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932.

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• 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.

  Andre Breton

  Hands, Crowds, Pistols

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

  Eugene Ionesco

  Spiritual, Expression, Needs

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• It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.

  Andre Breton

  Existence, Surrealism, Elsewhere

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

  Dong Kingman

  Dream, Art, Paint

  "Twenty-two Famous Painters and Illustrators Tell How They Work". Book by Dong Kingman, 1964.

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• 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.

  Andre Breton

  People, Secret, Insane

  "First Manifesto of Surrealism". Book by Andre Breton, 1924.

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• 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.

  Dennis Lehane

  Laughing, Doe, Hey

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• 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

  Art, Order, Play

  Henry Moore, Alan G. Wilkinson (2002). “Henry Moore-- Writings and Conversations”, p.197, Univ of California Press

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

  Andre Kertesz

  Names, Use, Groups

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• I define Inner Space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind meet and merge. Now, in the landscapes of the surrealist painters, for example, one sees the regions of Inner Space; and increasingly I believe that we will encounter in film and literature scenes which are neither solely realistic nor fantastic. In a sense, it will be a movement in the interzone between both spheres.

  J. G. Ballard

  Believe, Reality, Hands

  Munich Round Up Interview, 1968.

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

  Susan Sontag

  Taste, Juxtaposition, Quotations

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.68, Macmillan

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• 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

  Real, Eerie, Vision

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• Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies of romanticism, such a beautifully and finally absurd one that it is hard to believe it existed as anything but a logical construction; and what imagist found it possible to go on writing imagist poetry? A number of poets have stopped writing entirely; others, like recurring decimals, repeat the novelties they commeced with, each time less valuably than before. And there are surrealist poetry, and political poetry, and all the othe refuges of the indigent.

  Randall Jarrell

  Believe, Writing, Two

  "Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964". Book by Randall Jarrell, "A Note on Poetry" (p. 50), 1980.

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• 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

  Artist, Expression, Painting

  Christina Burrus, Frida Kahlo (2008). “Frida Kahlo: 'I Paint My Reality'”

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• 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

  Taste, Cameras, Experts

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.93, Macmillan

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• 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.

  Alan Moore

  Art, Talking, Movement

  Interview with Matthew De Abaitua, www.harrybravado.com. 1998.

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• The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd with his belly at barrel-level.

  Andre Breton

  Hands, Levels, Crowds

  "Not Numb" by Madeleine Watts, logger.believermag.com. March 25, 2016.

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• Growing up I was very into art. In high school I was into the surrealists and impressionists, and I loved Klimt. In '91 or '92 I saw one of those Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled billboards. I was just really arrested by it. It was kind of my first foray into contemporary art. It was a turning point for me as to what art could be and what it meant and the impact it could have.

  Chloe Sevigny

  Art, Growing Up, School

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Sentimental

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “Gravity's Rainbow”, p.541, Penguin

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

  Louise Bourgeois

  Tragedy, Made, Anathema

  Source: www.procuniarworkshop.com

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• I feel that the surrealists have created a series of valid external landscapes which have their direct correspondences within our own minds.

  J. G. Ballard

  Mind, Landscape, Feels

  Conversation with George MacBeth, BBC3, February 01, 1967.

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• 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.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Writing, Thinking, Swans

  Jose Ortega Y Gasset (1960). “the Revolt of the Masses”

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