"People were no longer limited to talking about their phobias, manias, feelings and desires, but could now touch them, manipulate and operate them with their own hands."
"Regardless of the form in which it is ultimately presented, the object is intended to amuse, encourage, bore, be thought-provoking, but never to arouse admiration for the technical perfection usually called for by a work of art. I say, the world is full of extraordinary craftsmen, but there are only a few practical dreamers"
"With Giacometti, new figures place their feet on the earth, albeit with infinite scruples, having arisen from the hearts and minds of men."
"I tried to make forms grow. I put my trust in the example of seeds, stars, clouds, plants, animals, men, and finally in my innermost being."
"Attempts I have sometimes made to consciously give form to a painting or even to a sculpture have always failed."
"All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. Both sides of the artist's personality must play their part."
"It is in sculpture that I will create a truly phantasmagoric world of living monsters."
"The exploitation of the chance meeting of two remote realities on a plane unsuitable to them."
"To give form to a myth, to produce a new reality from a given material, from a physical thrust that forces a gesture to be carried and placed in the world. The real suddenly appears from this struggle."
"When I invented Surrealist objects, I had the deep inner fulfilment 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."
"It is essentially upon the object that Surrealism has thrown most light in recent years. Only the very close examination of the many recent speculations to which the object has publicly given rise (the oneiric object, the object functioning symbolically, the real and virtual object, the moving but silent object, the phantom object, the discovered object, etc.), can give one a proper grasp of the experiments that Surrealism is engaged in now. In order to continue to understand the movement, it is indispensable to focus one's attention on this point."
