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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.

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

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.

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

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.

This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.

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

As far as the style, I was fascinated by surrealism.

But surrealism is present in most of my pictures.

Surrealism was necessary - essential, even - in the 1920s to bridge the gap between rationalism and the subconscious. It started something important. But by the early '60s, it had become petit-bourgeois; it was too intellectual and romantic, and had ground to a halt. It had become respectable.