Surrealist Quotes - Page 2

• When I think of my art tribe - you know, my peeps - there are certain people who are autobiographers that I really love. But for the most part, overwhelmingly, my tribes are the surrealists and the storytellers, in song and literature.

  Regina Spektor

  Song, Art, Thinking

  Source: www.harpersbazaar.com

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• 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.

  Virgil Thomson

  Discipline, Lovely, Asking

  Virgil Thomson (1984). “A Virgil Thomson reader”, Plume

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• 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.'

  Albert Camus

  Real, Past, Life And Death

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.97, Vintage

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• In an age in which the classic words of the Surrealists— 'As beautiful as the unexpected meeting, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella'—can become reality and perfectly achievable with an atom bomb, so too has there been a surge of interest in biomechanoids

  H. R. Giger

  Beautiful, Reality, Age

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• In the future, we've forgotten it. It's disappointing to find out that the past is the present is the future. Nobody wants that. And yet, that's what it is. Maybe it's a kind of surrealist move, to use language like "post-racial" - thinking that if you create the language for it, it will happen. I wish it worked that way. But that's not our reality.

  Claudia Rankine

  Moving, Reality, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

  Andre Breton

  Gun, Crowds, Walking

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• I just play to progressive audiences. You know, if they're watching Discovery Channel, History Channel, that kind of thing, "Monty Python" have already laid the groundwork. They're known around the world. People like that kind of surrealist, left-field humor, and that's what I do. And "Saturday Night Live," a lot of American humor. "The Simpsons," above all, the weird, left-field humor, which I love. And sardonic. So that's all I'm doing. I find that audience, and they're in every developed country around the world.

  Eddie Izzard

  Country, Night, Python

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• Most artists are surrealists

  Dong Kingman

  Artist

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

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• 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

  Long, Choices, Given

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• If I indulge myself and surrender to memory, I can still feel the knot of excitement that gripped me as I turned the corner into Rue Mimosas, looking for the house of Rene Magritte. It was August, 1965. I was 33 years old and about to meet the man whose profound and witty surrealist paintings had contradicted my assumptions about photography.

  Duane Michals

  Photography, Witty, Memories

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• 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.

  Rebecca Horn

  Get Away, Cabaret, Provoking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• 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

  Want, Poetic, Hard

  "Michel Gondry Pinch Hits For Tokyo!" by Ayako Fujitani and Ryo Kase, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 6, 2009.

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• All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.

  Ivan Chtcheglov

  Wall, Moving, Writing

  Guy Debord, Ivan Chtcheglov, Asger Jorn, Raoul Vaneigem, Mustapha Khayati (2014). “Situationism: A Compendium”, p.5, Bread and Circuses Publishing

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• 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.

  J. G. Ballard

  Art, War, Keys

  "Age of unreason". Interview with Jeannette Baxter, www.theguardian.com. June 22, 2004.

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• The most important quote about poetry and politics that I know is from a different situationist, Guy Debord. He was locked in a debate with the French Surrealists, many of whom by the 40s and 50s were part of the French communist party apparatus. Many Surrealists eventually argued for instrumentalizing art for political ends. Debord countered, "I don't want to put poetry in the service of revolution. I want to put revolution in the service of poetry".

  Joshua Clover

  Art, Guy, Political

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• 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

  Believe, Men, Joy

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• 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

  Reality, Technique, Photographer

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• A text makes the word more specific. It really kind of defines it within the context in which it is being used. If it is just taken out of a context and presented as a sort of object, which is what - you know, which is a contemporary art idea, you know. It is like an old surrealist idea or an old cubist idea to take something out of context and put it in a completely different context. And it sort of gives it a different meaning and creates another world, another kind of world in which we enter.

  Robert Barry

  Art, Taken, Ideas

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• I always read the Latin American writers. I love so many of them: Gabriel García Márquez, José Donoso, Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector. I also love a lot of American experimental writers and surrealist European writers. But perhaps The Persian Book of Kings was the greatest influence - I encourage people to look at it. There is such a wealth of incredible stories.

  Porochista Khakpour

  Kings, Latin, Book

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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

  Writing, Law, Movement

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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

  Ideas, Way, Poetic

  "Wilco". Interview with Jason Crock, pitchfork.com. May 7, 2007.

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• 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

  Dream, Literature, Painting

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Not to say that the process assumes anything of "greater" or "lesser" importance, though: it's just more graphic information. Take the surrealists, for example, or a work by Cage. For me, there's a great value in doing this with literature. There's a certain form of dependence; process and product inform each other, depend on each other. I consider myself a writer who doesn't write with a style, almost. I begin with tension, with a vibe, a character.

  Sergio Chejfec

  Character, Writing, Style

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I've always been a fan of reading art catalogues from exhibitions, and plays, and I've worked with a surrealist German playwright, Heiner Müller.

  Jenny Hval

  Art, Reading, Play

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• Luis Bunuel's two semishort surrealist hand grenades (cowritten in varying degrees with Salvador Dali) make a double bill that can restore your faith in the subversions of youth. Pure Spanish-Parisian piss and vinegar.

  Luis Bunuel

  Hands, Two, Degrees

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