Quotes About Surrealism

If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.

Everyday objects shriek aloud.

It is not my intention to make anything comprehensible. I am of the opinion that there are sufficient paintings which one understands after a shorter or longer delay, and that therefore some incomprehensible painting would now be welcome. I am at pains to deliver such, as far as possible.

The title means exactly what the words say: NAKED Lunch—a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.

I've never felt Truth was Beauty. Never. I've always felt that people can't take too much reality. I like being in Ingmar Bergman's world. Or in Louis Armstrong's world. Or in the world of the New York Knicks. Because it's not this world. You spend your whole life searching for a way out. You just get an overdose of reality, you know, and it's a terrible thing. I'm always fighting against reality.

I reached for the knob. At the same moment it began to melt and transform, turning pink and finally taking the shape of a flaccid penis. It flopped softly against the door, like a man was cramming it through the knob hole from the other side. I turned back to John and said, 'That door cannot be opened.

The man-shaped arrangement of meat rose up, as if functioning as one body. It pushed itself up on two arms made of game hens and country bacon, planting two hands with sausage-link fingers on the floor. The phrase "sodomized by a bratwurst poltergeist" suddenly flew through my mind. Finally it stood fully upright, looking like the mascot for a butcher shop whose profits went entirely to support the owner's acid habit.

Surrealism sought to maintain its autonomy and the right to continue its own particular investigations into ways of changing consciousness, the role of the unconscious within the social body, and the current state of language both visual and verbal.

Shepherdess of the Sphinxes by Leonor Fini.

Feet, what do I need them forIf I have wings to fly.

Dada aimed to destroy the reasonable deceptions of man and recover the natural and unreasonable order.

Surrealism, although the courses of literature paradoxically make room for it today, is not a discipline that can be taught.

Surrealism is born of a consciousness of the derisory condition allotted to the individual and his thought, and a refusal to accommodate oneself to it.

The work of art is a stuffed crocodile.

Acaso el último y verdadero sentido de la creación del artista consista en extender un velo sobre el sinsentido de la vida.

He turns to go—and that's when he gets kicked in the head by the half of the pantomime horse it's slipped his mind to shoot. He falls to the ground, dead himself on top of the pantomime fallen. It's a surrealist vision of hell. What's surrealist, Mr. Gluck? This is.

pequeño, y pobre, y atrasado, donde no se cumplen las leyes físicas, donde la aritmética es opinable, moldeable como la plastilina, donde se divide entre todos el mérito de unos pocos y la responsabilidad de unos pocos se multiplica por todos para que nadie tenga nunca ningún mérito ni responsabilidad alguna, porque las cosas pasan solas, como por arte de magia o porque no les queda más remedio que pasar.

Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.

Picture this: a human finger, cut off from its body, its hand...a separate human finger, running hopping along, all hunched over, on a glass sidewalk. I am that finger.

Tears fall from his eyes and arrange themselves on his cheek like Man Ray tears.

The paradoxical situation with a vast number of people today is that they are half asleep when awake, and half awake when asleep, or when they want to sleep.

Reality imposes its law on man, laws that he can only escape in dreams or in states of trance—or in insanity.

Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world.

The simplest surrealist act consists in going into the street with revolvers in your fist and shooting blindly into the crowd as much as possible. Anyone who has never felt the desire to deal thus with the current wretched principle of humiliation and stultification clearly belongs in this crowd himself with his belly at bullet height.