Surrealist Art Quotes

Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins. Do not forget to make proper arrangements for your last will and testament: speaking personally, I ask that I be taken to the cemetery in a moving van. May my friends destroy every last copy of the printing of the Speech concerning the Modicum of Reality.

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.

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

Surrealism is anathema for me. Because the surrealists made a joke of everything. And I consider life a tragedy.

Dali was the great painter then and surrealism was a way of life.

A virgin a whole virgin is judged made and so between curves and outlines and real seasons and more out glasses and a perfectly unprecedented arrangement between old ladies and mild colds there is no satin wood shining.

The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.

And Loplop, bird superior, has transformed himself into flesh without flesh and will dwell among us.

Paranoiac-critical activity makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality.

I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete.

The more I look at most of the art movements, it's all occultism, when you get down to it. The Surrealists were openly talking about being magicians.

The overintellectualization of surrealism can be a bromide. A dream interpreted is a deflated dream.

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 like Dali and Magritte. I also like the Scottish artist John Byrne, another surrealist.

Salvador Dali and fifty cents will get you a cup of clock melt.

If I indulge myself and surrender to memory, I can still feel the knot of excitement that gripped me as I turned the corner into Rue Mimosas, looking for the house of Rene Magritte. It was August, 1965. I was 33 years old and about to meet the man whose profound and witty surrealist paintings had contradicted my assumptions about photography.

I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

In recent times, Surrealist painters have used descriptive illusionistic academic methods.

Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.

I found Leonora Carrington's 'The Hearing Trumpet' really funny.

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.

I feel that the surrealists have created a series of valid external landscapes which have their direct correspondences within our own minds.

I used to hang out with Salvador Dali a lot. He was such a nice man. I really liked his wife Gala, too. People say that she was tricky, but she was never difficult with me.

Schiaparelli’s collaborations with Dali and Cocteau as well as Prada’s Fondazione Prada push art and fashion ever closer, in a direct, synergistic, and culturally redefining relationship.