“I speak only of myself since I do not wish to convince, I have no right to drag others into my river, I oblige no one to follow me and everybody practices his art in his own way." - Tristan Tzara "Dada Manifesto 1918”

“Dada is not modern at all, it is rather a return to a quasi-Buddhist religion of indifference. Dada puts an artificial sweetness onto things, a snow of butterflies coming out of a conjurer's skull. Dada is stillness and does not understand the passions.”

“Art needs an operation”

“Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.”

“There is a literature that does not reach the voracious mass. It is the work of creators, issued from a real necessity in the author, produced for himself. It expresses the knowledge of a supreme egoism, in which laws wither away. Every page must explode, either by profound heavy seriousness, the whirlwind, poetic frenzy, the new, the eternal, the crushing joke, enthusiasm for principles, or by the way in which it is printed. On the one hand a tottering world in flight, betrothed to the glockenspiel of hell, on the other hand: new men. Rough, bouncing, riding on hiccups. Behind them a crippled world and literary quacks with a mania for improvement.”

“and on the other side for lack of sun there is death perhapswaiting for you in the uproar of a dazzling whirlwind with a thousand explosive armsstretched toward you man flower passing from the seller's hands tothose of the lover and the lovedpassing from the hand of one event to the other passive and sad parakeetthe teeth of doors are chattering and everything is done withimpatience to make you leave quicklyman amiable merchandise eyes open but tightly sealedcough of waterfall rhythm projected in meridians and slicesglobe spotted with mud with leprosy and bloodwinter mounted on its pedestal of night poor night weak and steriledraws the drapery of cloud over the cold menagerieand holds in its hands as if to throw a ballluminous number your head full of poetry”

“Not the old, not the new, but the necessary.”