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Quotes About Surrealists

I had breathed in the atmosphere created by Henri Christophe, the monarch of incredible aims, much more surprising than all the kings invented by the surrealists.
~ Alejo Carpentier
Blake has been admired by the surrealists because like them he made of poetry a way of life: his pictorial and poetic imagery was the overflow of a spiritual crisis and his art asserted man's creative capacities.
~ ANNA BALAKIAN
Since Courbet, it's been believed that painting is addressed to the retina. That was everyone's error. The retinal shudder! Before, painting had other functions: it could be religious, philosophical, moral... our whole century is completely retinal, except for the Surrealists, who tried to go outside it somewhat.
~ Marcel Duchamp
I did exhibitions with the Surrealists (in Paris, in 1929) because their attitude revolted against 'art' and their attitude toward life itself was wise, as was Dada's.
~ Hans Arp
Some of the French surrealists at the beginning of the war had come over to New York and they brought out this magazine. It was a big, glossy magazine full of surrealist things.
~ Kenneth Koch
The shifting sands of the world... show how much the surrealists were drawn towards an interrogation of what reality actually is. Unlike fabulists of whatever hue, there is a materiality in surrealist writing that resolutely keeps it, one might say, 'down to earth'.
~ Michael Richardson
The last hundred years have been retinal; even the cubists were. The surrealists tried to free themselves, and earlier so had the dadaists, but unfortunately, these latter were nihilists and didn't produce enough to prove their point, which, by the way, they didn't have to prove - according to their theory.
~ Marcel Duchamp
In an age in which the classic words of the Surrealists - "As beatiful 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
I was a young boy when I met the Surrealists and the Dadaists. I admired them, and that is what they taught me: to admire. Admiration is very important. People who are unable to admire others lose an important part of their soul. My soul developed from a very early age through encounters with admired people.
~ Stephane Hessel
I love dreams, even when they're nightmares, which is usually the case. My dreams are always full of the same familiar obstacles, but it doesn't matter. My amour fou—for the dreams themselves as well as the pleasure of dreaming—is the single most important thing I shared with the surrealists.
~ Luis Bunuel