"Art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way as a bad emotion is still an emotion."
—Marcel Duchamp, "The Creative Act," Art News, Summer 1957

"I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naivety has no peer but my own."
—Andre Breton, Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, 1924

"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."
—Rene Magritte, quoted in Time, April 21, 1947

"If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames."
—Antonin Artaud

"In the subconscious you fuck ugly people, never beautiful, because the libido always desires something repulsive."
—Salvador Dali, interview, 1974

"Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love; it's an exchange of blood, a total embrace—without caution, without any thought of protecting yourself."
—Joan Miro, interview, Cahiers D'Art, 1936

“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”
—Salvador Dali

"The function of genius is to furnish cretins with ideas twenty years later."
—Louis Aragon, "La Porte-plume," Traite du style, 1928

"The virtue of pride, which was once the beauty of mankind, has given place to that fount of ugliness, Christian humility."
—Max Ernst, attributed

"It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere."
—Andre Breton