John Currin's exaggerated realism and his twisted women kept me off balance never knowing if they were sincere or ironic or some new emotion.

The kind of theater that I do is sort of 'narrative realism ' which I think in the broadest sense is legitimate to say is mainstream. I mean in a certain sense Suzan-Lori's plays have had mainstream levels of success. But Suzan-Lori is in some ways not a narrative realist.

As writers and readers as sinners and citizens our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

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.

I've kind of come to the conclusion that what passes for realism in movies has nothing to do with reality and that my stuff is more realistic than that.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

Our generation has an incredible amount of realism yet at the same time it loves to complain and not really change. Because if it does change then it won't have anything to complain about.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

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

All of Koons's best art - the encased vacuum cleaners the stainless-steel Rabbit (the late-twentieth century's signature work of Simulationist sculpture) the amazing gleaming Balloon Dog and the cast-iron re-creation of a Civil War mortar exhibited last month at the Armory - has simultaneously flaunted extreme realism idealism and fantasy.