Andre Breton Quotes

Dada is like your hopes: nothing like your paradise: nothing like your idols: nothing like your heroes: nothing like your artists: nothing like your religions: nothing

I had studied Dadaism after the Second World War. What attracted me to this movement was the style its inventors used when not engaged in Dadaistic activities. It was clear, luminous, simple without being banal, precise without being narrow; it was a style adapted to the expression of thought as well as of emotion. I connected this style with the Dadaistic exercises themselves

Dada cannot live in New York. All New York is dada, and will not tolerate a rival.

I like art. It's another way to rebel.

I never cared so much about making perfect sense. I wanted to make perfect nonsense.

All art is based on non-conformity.

It does not matter how badly you paint so long as you don't paint badly like other people.

Nobody does animation better than Disney; it's just that some of us wanted out of the box. Burton was one. I was another. We were the mutual complaint society.

Anyway I feel myself a bit on the edge on the art world, but I don't mind, I'm just pursuing my work in a very excited way. And there isn't really a mainstream anymore, is there?

Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized.

The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?

I don't think that people should be confined to any particular aesthetic.

Why not do something strange and different for once? Artists can do whatever they want!

The artist as an artist must be an anarchist

Cubism is not a manner but an aesthetic, and even a state of mind; it is therefore inevitably connected with every manifestation of contemporary thought. It is possible to invent a technique or a manner independently, but one cannot invent the whole complexity of a state of mind.

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.

If surrealism ever comes to adopt a particular line of moral conduct, it has only to accept the discipline that Picasso has accepted and will continue to accept.

Dada talks with you, it is everything, it includes everything, it belongs to all religions, can be neither victory nor defeat, it lives in space and not in time.

The idea of directing a film is a strange one for me. I feel anti-mathematical, in a way, in that sense. I don't like when things make sense. I prefer if they don't.

Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.

There's such a freedom about being an artist... You're not accountable - you're this renegade thing.

Christmas is never over,unless you want it to be... Christmas is a state of mind.

Aesthetes never do anything but what they are told.

One's happiness is very largely a question of state of mind rather than the world you are looking at.

An artist must smash down the systems that domesticate the mind.