Quotes About Surrealism

The violent quarrel between the abstractionists and the surrealists seems to me quite unnecessary. 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.

Dali is like a man who hesitates between talent and genius, or, as one might once have said, between vice and virtue.

My painting is visible images which conceal nothing... they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.

Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.

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.

Jump in the urinal and stand on your head. I'm the one that's alive. You're all dead.

I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It's closer to our dreams.

Dali's Reclining Woman Wearing a Chemise looks like a dead slaughtered doll, and I can see preying eagles, broken arrows, and jazz musicians in Jackson Pollock, and because I believe that Man Ray and Duchamp were lovers.

You may not be interested in absurdity, she said firmly, but absurdity is interested in you.

Añadiré —Dalí me lo hizo observar— que los surrealistas eran guapos.

More than anything else, surrealism was a kind of call heard by certain people everywhere—in the United States, in Germany, Spain, Yugoslavia—who, unknown to one another, were already practicing instinctive forms of irrational expression.

The real purpose of surrealism was not to create a new literary, artistic, or even philosophical movement, but to explode the social order, to transform life itself.

No matter what the cost, I wanted to stay a surrealist.

Salvador Dalí seduced many ladies, particularly American ladies, but these seductions usually consisted of stripping them naked in his apartment, frying a couple of eggs, putting them on the woman's shoulders and, without a word, showing them the door.

Bound, elbow to elbow, darkness and night entered the dwelling.

Russia itself having turned to socialist realism - no-man's-land between surrealism and communism,...

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

[Dada is] perfectly kindhearted malice, alongside exact photography the only legitimate pictorial form of communication and balance in shared experience.

I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive.

I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It's closer to our dreams.

The dream of reason produces monsters

There's a strange quality in stop-motion photography, like in King Kong, that adds to the fantasy. If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane.

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

Angela Carter, Leonora Carrington, even nonsurrealists like Kafka and Nabokov - writers like these, who create paths between the firmly grounded and flights of fantasy, are my personal North Star.