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Surrealism: An archaic term. Formerly an art movement. No longer distinguishable from everyday life.

Realism isn't something most people associate with the fantasy genre, yet it's an essential element of great fantasy writing.

The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.

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.

A lot of the surreal writing that I love is really dreamlike. Like Murakami. He uses the real world, and it's pretty recognizable, but its populated by these strange visitors, or it has these underground spaces. I was always really compelled by that.

I think that the way of bringing realism into fantasy is to treat it as the commonplace.

When a writer is already stretching the bounds of reality by writing within a science fiction or fantasy setting, that writer must realize that excessive coincidence makes the fictional reality the writer is creating less 'real.'

It's a wonderful narrative device to bring someone from the outside and look through his eyes if you want to describe the absurdity and preposterous reality that is accepted amongst the ones who are inside.

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.