"In 1951 the two most subversive things that could happen to an ex-surrealist were: firstly, to become a mystic and secondly, to know how to draw. These two models of rigour happened to me at the same time."

“So, André Breton, if tonight I dream I am screwing you, tomorrow morning I will paint all of our best fucking positions with the greatest wealth of detail.”

“One might think that through ecstasy we would have access to a world as far from reality as that of the dream. – The repugnant can become desirable, affection cruelty, the ugly beautiful, faults qualities, qualities black miseries.”

“If you refuse to study anatomy, the arts of drawing and perspective, the mathematics of aesthetics, and the science of color, let me tell you that this is more a sign of laziness than of genius.”

“Let us watch this de Kooning with his prematurely white hair making his great sleepwalker's movements, as though he was waiting in a dream to open bays of Biscay, to explode islands like pieces of orange or Parma violets, to tear continents from a cerulean blue split by oceans of Naples yellow.. ..if by good or by ill fortune, in the middle of this Dionysian demiurg the image of The Eternal Feminine should appear.. the least that might have happened to her would be that she should emerge wearing nothing but a little make-up.”

“Shit scared them . Shit and arseholes. Yet, what was more human and more needful of transcending! From that moment, I know I would keep on obsessing them with what they most dreaded. And when I invented Surrealist objects, I had the deep inner fulfillment of knowing, while the group went into ecstasies over their operation, that these objects very exactly reproduced the contradictions of a rectal sphincter at work, so that what they were thus admiring was their own fear.”

“Telephone, pedal washbasin, white refrigerators gleaming with Ripolin , bidet, small phonograph.. ..objects of authentic and pure poetry .. ..The Parthenon was not built as a ruin. It was built on a new surface without patina, like our automobiles. / we will not always bear on our shoulders the weight of our father's corpse.”