These surreal quotes will inspire you. Surreal is marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging surreal quotes, surreal sayings, and surreal proverbs.
Best Surreal Quotes
- “I compose most of my tweets with care, as if they were aphorisms – they are not usually dashed-off. Sometimes I’m surprised by the high, poetic quality of Twitter – it lends itself to a surreal sort of self-expression.” ~ Joyce Carol Oates
- “One of the most surreal moments in this election was after the third debate, when I heard a talking head say, Al Gore won on substance, on the issues. But you have to give the victory to Bush because he seems presidential.” ~ Bradley Whitford
- “And the whole Oscar thing, that is just surreal: you spend months and months doing promotion, and then come back to reality with this golden thing in your hands. You put it in the office and then you just have to look at it sitting on the shelf. And, after about two weeks, you go: ‘What is that doing there?'” ~ Javier Bardem
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“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.” ~ Salvador Dali
- “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
- “Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realized that the imagery in my mind wasn’t insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.” ~ John Lennon
- “The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects – making it possible… to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.” ~ Susan Sontag
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“It’s so surreal being here.” ~ Scotty McCreery
- “Even my nighttime dreams are very, very rooted in reality. They just start to become surreal, little by little.” ~ Hiro Murai
- “When you get praise from someone that you really admire it’s really surreal.” ~ Jeremy Renner
- “Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.” ~ Salvador Dali
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“The over intellectualization of surrealism can be a bromide. A dream interpreted is a deflated dream.” ~ Graham Joyce
- “My images were surreal simply in the sense that my vision brought out the fantastic dimension of reality. My only aim was to express reality, for there is nothing more surreal than reality itself. If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary.” ~ Brassai
- “I would never write realistic prose. I don’t like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.” ~ Marguerite Young
- “They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” ~ Frida Kahlo
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“I dream in color, and it’s always very surreal. My dream world is complete Hieronymus Bosch and Dali. I love it, I look forward to it every night” ~ John Lennon
- “What’s great about science fiction is that it allows for surreal scenarios even if they pertain to the real world.” ~ Larissa Sansour
- “Film sets are constantly amusing because you really are creating something that is so very surreal, and I kind of like that.” ~ Hugo Weaving
- “Musicals don’t get enough credit for being so surreal. It’s like an alternate universe.” ~ Ezra Koenig
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“In these surreal days, there is one truth. Nothing justified the killing of innocent people in America last week and nothing justifies the killing of innocent people anywhere else.” ~ John Pilger
- “I have tried being surreal, but my frogs hop right back into their realistic ponds.” ~ Mason Cooley
- “It’s definitely surreal to watch yourself in a movie.” ~ Justin Long
- “I came home one day from school after being chased by kids singing “Yellow Submarine”, and I didn’t understand why. It just seemed surreal: why are they singing that song to me? I came home and I freaked out on my dad: ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were in The Beatles?’ And he said, ‘Oh, sorry. Probably should have told you that.'” ~ Dhani Harrison
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“If you have a surreal life like I do, you’ve got to have fun along the way.” ~ Victoria Beckham
- “Children have an easier ability to tap into the surreal than adults do, in a funny kind of way.” ~ Julie Taymor
- “People recognize me all the time. I think it’s really nice. I don’t mind it at all. It feels kind of surreal when people know who you are and I think that it’s really cool.” ~ Dakota Fanning
- “Survivor Series is something that was very surreal to me to be a part of, but now, I just want to do it again.” ~ CM Punk
- “No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions.” ~ Terence McKenna
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“Criticism is a surreal state, like a good drug gone bad. When it’s bad you wish it would stop, and when it’s good, you can’t get enough.” ~ Gale Harold
- “Surreal can be exciting and good, and it can be like living inside an alien landscape, and it can be completely interesting, or you can be alienated from your own life – inside your own life, it doesnt feel familiar any more.” ~ Feist
- “The first time I went to the Oscars was surreal. It wasn’t really me walking the red carpet. It was like watching a movie of a Hollywood premiere. You have to have an intellectual distance from it, because it’s so atypical from your everyday life.” ~ Mark Hamill
- “All this stuff is kind of surreal to me – Ididn’t think I’d be in the league or none of that. It was making it to college. That’s about it.” ~ Kevin Durant
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“It’s such a surreal experience, being shot out of the cannon for any kind of first season show. It all seems very dreamlike.” ~ Bryan Fuller
- “I wanted to literalize the surreal here. Those are my favorite kinds of stories. I love when Gabriel García Márquez does that, for instance – it adds to the joy, dares you to believe the unbelievable. And why not: so much of life is so dreamlike, so strange, so absurd.” ~ Porochista Khakpour
- “I don’t love horror movies with something surreal happening. That doesn’t work for me. What’s terrifying is something that could actually happen to me and what I would do. I don’t know how to throw a punch, and I’ve never had to do it.” ~ Katie Aselton , Love surreal quotes
- “I’ve only made short films and two features, which are very different. One is a surreal comedy, and the other is a period tragedy. I’m curious to know what misconceptions this could trigger” ~ Sophie Barthes
- “The world is mystical, mysterious, powerful, brutal and awesome… it has a surreal logic, and moves in patterns, some of which can be unearthed and illuminated – on condition that I am listening – with my spirit, heart, eyes and guts on a single axis.” ~ Nina Menkes
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“At home, Danes try to resolve their problems amicably so it’s just surreal to see these violent pictures on TV. But as the prime minister, I can’t be controlled by my emotions.” ~ Anders Fogh Rasmussen
- “You get a kind of surreal feeling and also it allows you to focus on the things we want you to focus on in a new way – the stuff that’s very small and mundane that happens in a person’s life when they’re in a hotel room. There’s more interest because you’re seeing a puppet do things that you’re very familiar with that you might not notice if it was a human doing it.” ~ Charlie Kaufman , Feeling surreal quotes
- “Sometimes, literally within a few minutes, you’d be off this amazing roaring scene and back at your hotel room, staring at the pattern of the wallpaper. It’s very surreal. You’re back in your room, and it’s dead quiet and really weird.” ~ Andy Summers
- “The College World Series, that’s the end-all deal as a college player. To get a chance to play in the World Series and win it, that was surreal.” ~ Morgan Ensberg
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“There are major efforts being made to dismantle Social Security, the public schools, the post office – anything that benefits the population has to be dismantled. Efforts against the U.S. Postal Service are particularly surreal.” ~ Noam Chomsky
- “Fox News seems much more conservative than it is because no other television network over the past half-century has been anything but decidedly liberal. When the media norm is liberal, liberals equate liberalism with objectivity and deviations from it as bias, just as liberals preach tolerance toward all ideas – except conservative ones. Their self-delusion is surreal.” ~ David Limbaugh
- “And that first screening was overwhelming. You were there. People applauded when the title card comes in; there’s a big “gasp moment” partway through the film. It couldn’t have gone better, and it was very surreal.” ~ James Ponsoldt
- “And I was constantly trying to stay in body, so to speak. It feels very surreal, and I go away to a happy place where I’m there but not really there. I was just trying to enjoy the night, I guess is what I’m saying. We had a lovely after-party.” ~ James Ponsoldt
- “My music already has this oldish kind of quality to it, like you don’t necessarily know what era it was recorded in, so it all kind of felt surreal and weird. Night after night when I played live, I was really trying to figure it out in real time, and I still don’t know what effect I’m going for or what effect I actually achieve. Looking back, I feel like it would be arrogant of me not to appreciate the fact that I’ve been able to do whatever I want and still have an audience come see me.” ~ Ariel Pink
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“By choosing a precise intersection between subject and time, he may transform the ordinary into the extraordinary and the real into the surreal.” ~ Constantine Manos
- “The things that I write are autobiographical in a surreal sense, like when you have a dream and you go to the doctor’s office, but then you turn around and it’s actually your childhood home and the doctor has turned into Ryan Reynolds.” ~ Diablo Cody
- “I don’t shoot kittens with balls of wool. I don’t shoot sunsets. What draws me? Ironic, surreal, unexplained, timely moments.” ~ Graham Nash
- “I realized early on that artifice attracted me to an image more than any other quality – I mean artifice in the sense of staging and heightened color and exaggerated lighting, not a surreal or fictive moment… I think the lighting and feeling of Cinemascope, the movies I saw as a kid, always stayed with me as a kind of glorious vision of reality.” ~ Laurie Simmons
- “It is so surreal to come into a shop and see pictures of myself everywhere and hear my album playing.” ~ Michelle McManus
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“Spaghetti Westerns are really brutal and operatic with a surreal quality to the violence.” ~ Quentin Tarantino
- “I definitely have recurring dreams. My dreams are crazy and surreal, which is why I appreciate Carl Jung, ’cause I feel that there has to be some kind of correlation. My dreams are like surreal sci-fi thrillers, and I don’t spend time watching stuff like that. I never grew up on stuff like that. I’ve always just had very, very vivid dreams. This is awful to say, but, lately, I’ve been dreaming about witnessing murder a lot. What does this mean?” ~ Diane Birch
- “I think the film and TV industry – the acting world – has a tendency to attract a lot of people for the wrong reasons; reasons that are less than artistic. It has a tendency to be pretty superficial, and pretty shallow and fake. I think what New Zealanders and Australians – and the English, I guess – have to offer is that we don’t carry a lot of that baggage. We come over and we’re pretty grounded. But on the flip side of that, you end up in a very unfamiliar environment being treated in a way that’s a little bit surreal.” ~ Antony Starr
- “The whole press thing and who you are in the media, or what you have to project yourself to be, it feels very much like another person. People say to me, “Oh, your life must be changing,” and I’m like, “Uh, I guess?” For me, it’s such a gradual change, and I don’t see it from the outside like everybody else does. It’s weird, I see my face on a bus or online or somebody has my picture as their picture on Twitter and it’s all a bit weird and I feel very disconnected from it and very much, “I guess that’s me.” It’s very surreal.” ~ Tatiana Maslany
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“Every kid dreams of playing in the NFL or MLB and I was that 27-year-old that dreamed of fighting in the UFC. It was kind of surreal to see that I have actually accomplished what I set out to do. It’s better than I could have ever imagined.” ~ Charlie Brenneman
- “… You get surreal numbers by playing games. I used to feel guilty in Cambridge that I spent all day playing games, while I was supposed to be doing mathematics. Then, when I discovered surreal numbers, I realized that playing games IS math.” ~ John Horton Conway
- “A record is something that isn’t real or true. It’s like cinema. It’s a construction of something hyper-real and surreal and unreal all at the same time. You make a space that doesn’t really exist. One of the big joys of being in this line of work is building the recorded versions of the songs.” ~ Will Oldham
- “I hate vulgarity. I hate vulgarity even though it attracts me – and it attracts me very much. I love all that is transgressive or vulgar. But in my opinion, it has to reach a limit that is always a little surreal and never becomes in your face.” ~ Riccardo Tisci
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“I don’t like to think that people recognize who I am when I’m out and about, and anyone who comes up to me in real life can testify that I suddenly clam up and get very nervous. People asking me for my autograph in H&M was beyond surreal.” ~ Susanna Lau
- “The religious cant that will send American troops into battle is perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. Bush has an arm-lock on God. And God has very particular political opinions. God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America’s Middle Eastern policy, and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.” ~ John le Carre
- “Obviously, we suppress things, emotions, things during the day – thoughts that we obviously haven’t thought through enough, and in that state of sleep when our subconscious, or mind just sort of randomly fires off different surreal story structures, and when we wake up we should pay attention to these things.” ~ Leonardo DiCaprio
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“A solid base for any comedy is just honesty and truth, and it coming from a real place. As surreal as this show gets and is, ultimately, we’re dealing with a character that most can’t see the way that I can see it.” ~ Elijah Wood
- “When I started experimenting with fantasy and horror films and looking for characters who had some sort of emotional or mental difficulty, I saw opportunities to express my music – dare I say art – in a way that I could get a bit surreal.” ~ Nicolas Cage
- “The biggest misconception usually is to assume that I am a scientist and that I work for scientists. I work for the public to access the surreal and fantastical in science.” ~ Nelly Ben Hayoun
