Jerry Saltz Quotes

It's a strange world, as David Lynch would say.

Surrealism: An archaic term. Formerly an art movement. No longer distinguishable from everyday life.

It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art.

It's an odd world.

My ideas are not meant to suggest dreams or reality, but a surreal quality.

I have tried being surreal, but my frogs hop right back into their realistic ponds.

I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland.

Happiness isn't happiness unless there's a violin-playing goat.

But surrealism is present in most of my pictures.

My advice to new artists is to embrace a broader concept of timelessness than vintage or retro.

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

I don't know much about modern art, but I guess I am modern art.

To say that such-and-such a circumstance is 'Kafkaesque' is to admit to the denigration of an imagination that has burned a hole in what we take to be modernism - even in what we take to be the ordinary fabric and intent of language. Nothing is like 'The Hunger Artist.' Nothing is like 'The Metamorphosis.'

Every day is bizarre.

I get so tired of people saying, 'Oh, you only make fantasy films and this and that', and I'm like, 'Well no, fantasy is reality', that's what Lewis Carroll showed in his work.

You never know when contemporary art is going to insinuate itself into a normally art-free zone.

It's amazing what you can do with an E in A-Level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw.

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

I don't think the critics could understand what we were doing.

Art must take reality by surprise.

I'm most interested in finding the strangeness and irony in reality. That's my forte.

The more far-out artists, the better.

I've never been able to understand what they mean by 'Pinteresque,'. I'm sure it's indefinable.

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

Twin Peaks' without David Lynch is like a girl without a secret.