Quotes About Surrealism

"Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with," the Mock Turtle replied, "and the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision."

"Talking of axes," said the Duchess, "chop off her head!"

I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.

The old slogan 'truth is stranger than fiction,' that still corresponded to the surrealist phase of this estheticization of life, is obsolete. There is no more fiction that life could possibly confront, even victoriously-it is reality itself that disappears utterly in the game of reality-radical disenchantment, the cool and cybernetic phase following the hot stage of fantasy.

Authors must spend months, years making fantasy believable in a single work while reality runs rampant and complete chaos elsewhere.

Berenice's drawing was good. It had been done in a kind of painstaking fury, and depicted a creature with a black hole for a face. This creature was moving forward with its shoulders hunched. Its arms were long scalloped wings, like those on a bat. They began near its neck and dragged on the ground on either side, a prop or perhaps a hindrance for the vague, boneless body.

I was stealing salt shakers again. Ten, sometimes twelve a night, shoving them up my sleeves, smuggling them out of bars and diners and anywhere else I could find them. In the morning, wherever I woke up, I was always covered in salt. I was cured meat. I had become beef jerky. Even as a small child, I knew it would one day come to this.

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

The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

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.

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

Tensurrealism creates actual and non-compromised reality, jamboree, fervor, fascination, poetics of an active enthusiasm, interludium, lyrical practice, active happiness.

Everyday objects shriek aloud.

Nude descending a staircase headless, not knowing where she is going but brave because all dreams lack conclusions and she is not enlisted to an ending.

Reality doesn't surprise me. But that's not true: I suddenly feel such a hunger for the "thing to really happen" that I cry out and bite into reality with my lacerating teeth. And afterwards give a sigh over the captive whose flesh I ate. And again, for a long while, I do without real reality and find comfort in living from my imagination.

It was Salvador Dalí who said the red wine of Cadaqués has the bitter taste of tears.

There were many painters there, painters of every sort and of every degree of eminence—Max Ernst, for instance, one of the founders of surrealism

All of my heroes, like Dali, are people who pioneered various forms of cinema.

Useless, it was useless to get in since I don't want to go anywhere. Bluish objects pass the windows. In jerks all stiff, and brittle; people, walls; a house offers me its black heart through open windows; and the windows pale, all that is black becomes blue, blue this great yellow brick house advancing uncertainly, trembling, suddenly stopping and taking a nose dive.

I know loving me isn't easy – the all-night helicopter parties, the glow-in-the-dark haircuts, but when I look at you it's like praying with my eyes. I know it's stupid to not own a gun yet have so many triggers, but in some other world gigantic seashells hold humans to their ears and listen to the echo of machines.

Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again.

Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.

This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.