surrealism

[David] Salle's earlier work had been marked by a kind of spaciousness, sometimes an emptiness, such as surrealist works are prone to. But here everything was condensed, impacted, mired. The paintings were like an ugly mood.

One can show one's contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the world by making of one's life a poem of incoherence and absurdity.

Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.

This place has only three exits, sir: Madness, and Death.

I am the soul in limbo.

What bothers me most about my teeth is that they don__ travel loin south, don__ sprout from the Mother Mouth. Vagina dentata, come closah, say high.

Oh, sheep. I've lost all my sobbing colours.

Strictly speaking, it might not be a dream. It was reality, but a reality imbued with all the qualities of a dream. A different sphere of reality, where - at a special time and place - imagination had been set free.

Dreams are memories. Memories are dreams. But my time with you hasn__ become a dream just yet. Because the sensation of your kisses keep me from sleep. I__ in love, God help me, I__ in love.

Dreams are memories we__e lost to sleep.

Several people toss and turn in their sleep, startled by the lines of the newspapers in their dreams, knives out, lights out, lights out, knives out!

A constant human error: to believe in an end to one's fantasies. Our daydreams are the measure of our unreachable truth. The secret of all things lies in the emptiness of the formula that guard them.

Every page should explode, either because of its staggering absurdity, the enthusiasm of its principles, or its typography.

As humans, we have invented lots of useful kinds of lie. As well as lies-to-children ('as much as they can understand') there are lies-to-bosses ('as much as they need to know') lies-to-patients ('they won't worry about what they don't know') and, for all sorts of reasons, lies-to-ourselves. Lies-to-children is simply a prevalent and necessary kind of lie. Universities are very familiar with bright, qualified school-leavers who arrive and then go into shock on finding that biology or physics isn't quite what they've been taught so far. 'Yes, but you needed to understand that,' they are told, 'so that now we can tell you why it isn't exactly true.' Discworld teachers know this, and use it to demonstrate why universities are truly storehouses of knowledge: students arrive from school confident that they know very nearly everything, and they leave years later certain that they know practically nothing. Where did the knowledge go in the meantime? Into the university, of course, where it is carefully dried and stored.

Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.