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.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Lady Gaga has a lot of energy, and that is fantastic, but she is using old surrealist images.
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
I like Dali and Magritte. I also like the Scottish artist John Byrne, another surrealist.
Billy Connolly
And the most unusual and surrealistic place in New York City is Central Park.
Christo
My son got me into 'The Mighty Boosh.' I just love that surrealist humour.
David Morrissey
I found that I could write two kinds of short stories: I could write very absurd, kind of surrealistic, funny stories; or I could write very dark, realistic - hyper-realistic - stories. I was never happy with that, because I couldn't meld the two.
Dennis Lehane
Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.
Eugene Ionesco
They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.
Frida Kahlo
Really, I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself.
I could have been a cult writer if I'd kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.
Haruki Murakami
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.
Henry Moore
I spend several days at a time without enough sleep. At first, normal activities become annoying. When you are too tired to eat, you really need some sleep. A few days later, things become strange. Loud noises become louder and more startling, familiar sounds become unfamiliar, and life reinvents itself as a surrealist dream.
Henry Rollins
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.
J. G. Ballard
My room is dominated by the huge painting, which is a copy of 'The Violation' by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux. The original was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, and I commissioned an artist I know, Brigid Marlin, to make a copy from a photograph. I never stop looking at this painting and its mysterious and beautiful women.
I would love to have been a painter in the tradition of the surrealist painters who I admire so much.
The first piece I ever collected was a Roy Lichtenstein: a sculpture called 'Surrealist Head II'. There was a waiting list. I remember Steve Martin wanted one, and I wanted one. I got the 'Surrealist Head', and I was thrilled.
Jeff Koons
Life on the road is very different from a normal, day to day life, and sometimes that surrealistic existence can have an effect on you, you tend to forget that's not really how things are supposed to be. But there comes a point where you have to pace yourself and find a place in your mind where you can be real.
Joe Nichols
Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly, the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be.
John Updike
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
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.
I never thought of myself as a Surrealist. I didn't think of myself as anything. I try not to. We all have these egos.
'The Big Sleep' is an unsentimental, surrealist excitement in which most of the men in Hollywood's underworld are murdered and most of the women go for an honest but not unwilling private sleuth (Humphrey Bogart).
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.
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.
It's very hard to say I'm surrealist. It's like saying I'm poetic. It's not something you want necessarily to be aware of.
Claude Cahun is a fascinating artist - one of the few women to be part of the surrealist movement, she and her partner Suzanne Malherbe took on men's names and made artworks that investigated female identity long before 'The Second Sex' or Cindy Sherman.
To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.
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.
The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.
When I was at school when I was 16, I was in a quandary because I didn't know whether I wanted to join the army - I had this terrible desire to be a tank driver in the Royal Tank Regiment, genuinely - or whether I wanted to go to art college because half of me wanted to be in the army, and the other half of me wanted to be a surrealist.
In the Thirties, when I was in New York, I did the first surrealistic ballet in a show of mine.
