Most artists are surrealists

There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.

My son got me into 'The Mighty Boosh.' I just love that surrealist humour.

I never knew I was a surrealist till Andre Breton came to Mexico and told me I was.

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

Lady Gaga has a lot of energy, and that is fantastic, but she is using old surrealist images.

The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly

They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.

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

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

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.

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.

Really, I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself.

Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.

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 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.

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.

'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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Share This Page