Andre Breton Quotes

Surrealism is merely the reflection of the death process. It is one of the manifestations of a life becoming extinct, a virus which quickens the inevitable end.

Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.

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

Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.

The vice named surrealism is the immoderate and impassioned use of the stupefacient image or rather of the uncontrolled provocation of the image for its own sake and for the element of unpredictable perturbation and of metamorphosis which it introduces into the domain of representation; for each image on each occasion forces you to revise the entire Universe.

I am not a surrealist. I am only a realist. All this group - surrealists - use my name. No, no, I am realist.

Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings.

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.

Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principle problems of life.

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

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

Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, whether verbally or in writing, or in any other way, the real process of thought. Thought's dictation, free from any control by the reason, independent of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.

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.

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

Surrealism to me is reality. Psychedelic vision is reality to me and always was.

Surrealism is based on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought.

Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America.

Hitch your unconscious mind to your writing arm.

I had a dream that she put her foot through my belly button and I was playing this little piggy went to the market just with her toes, just her foot was sticking out of my belly button and it was completely normal!

One can understand why Surrealism was not afraid to make for itself a tenet of total revolt, complete insubordination, of sabotage according to rule, and why it still expects nothing save from violence.

It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for human beings. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.

It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream - making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams.

Man is not what he believes himself to be in his conscious decisions.

Surrealism is the magical surprise of finding a lion in a wardrobe, where you were 'sure' of finding shirts.

The trick is to use the drugs once to get there, and maybe spend the next ten years trying to get back there without the drug.