Quotes About Surrealism

I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.

Die Welt der Kunst und Fantasie ist die einzig wahre. The rest is a nightmare!

The reason why most absurdist plays take place in a no man's land with only two characters is mainly financial.

I like that feeling of discombobulation that comes in creating an absurd world that doesn't make sense. 'Monty Python' does a good job of it; 'Bugs Bunny,' too.

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

In the Thirties, when I was in New York, I did the first surrealistic ballet in a show of mine.

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

Long live transfinite mountains, the hollow earth, time machines, fractal writing, aliens, dada, telepathy, flying saucers, warped space, teleportation, artificial reality, robots, pod people, hylozoism, endless shrinking, intelligent goo, antigravity, surrealism, software highs, two-dimensional time, gnarly computation, the art of photo composition, pleasure zappers, nanomachines, mind viruses, hyperspace, monsters from the deep and, of course, always and forever, the attack of the giant ants!

The world was no longer solid and dependable, it was porous and deceptive. Anything could disappear. At the same time, everything I looked at was very clear. It was like one of those surrealist paintings we'd studied in school the year before. Melted clocks in the desert, solid but unreal.

Perhaps because of this, many have looked at my practice in terms of science and technology, however, for me it is just as informed by Surrealism and mythology.

The famous soft watches are nothing else than the tender, extravagant, solitary, paranoic-critical camembert oftime and space.

You painted armless beings, swimming in blinding color, and they had to exist like that forever. Could they see you with all those tiny, scattered eyes? Or did they only see the heaven and hell of their own shining realm, anchored to the studs in the wall by a piece of twisted wire?

Long live the new flesh.

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.

I turned my copy over to reread the back cover: always a creepy experience once you had finished a book, like getting a message from a dead person. "Nadja, originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written," it said.

Young girls would paint themselves like parakeets. Bothersome children are like parakeets. If you dream a parakeet is lying in an oven you may be certain that soon you will die. The shells of hatched parakeets turn into maggots, which turn into lizards, which creep down the throats of sleeping people

The Surrealism movement, our professor explained, was inspired by Freud's concept of the uncanny, the dreadful double. According to Freud, doubling creates meaning. Doubling turns sounds into words; a baby first speaks by turning ma into mama, pa into papa. But when a double appears uninvited—the buried object returns—it brings us into the realm of the uncanny. We watch dead things wake up. And we are afraid.

I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland.

I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.

Salvador Dali, lying on his deathbed in a stupor, is said to have been fed thousands of sheets of blank paper to sign for fake lithographs.

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.

When I was an adolescent, I abandoned my country at 23 years to come to Paris to know Andre Breton, the 'Pope of Surrealism.' And for three years, I was there working with him being a surrealist.

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali.