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.

Timothy Spall

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.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

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.

Frida Kahlo

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.

J. G. Ballard

I would love to have been a painter in the tradition of the surrealist painters who I admire so much.

J. G. Ballard

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