Donne aux rêves que tu as oubliés la valeur de ce que tu ne connais pas.

—André Breton and Paul Éluard, L’Immaculée Conception

Characters and voices in these stories began in what is real, but became, in fact, dreams.

—Jayne Anne Phillips, Black Tickets

To win the energies of intoxication for the revolution—this is the project about which Surrealism circles. … The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flâneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane.

—Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia”

In the first class that I took, a class about theory, the teacher told us about the works of the novelist Juan Goytisolo. “Goytisolo uses plagiarisms (other texts) in several ways: sometimes his characters read, discuss, or see other texts. Sometimes two simultaneous texts compose the narrative. Sometimes Goytisolo changes someone else’s text in an attempt to contaminate and subvert something or other. Count Julian, I mean Goytisolo, subverts, invades, seduces, and infects all that’s abhorrent to him by transforming the subject into an empirical self, a text among texts, a self that becomes a sign in its attempt at finding meaning and value. All that is left is sex alone and its naked violence.”

—Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology: A Novel

Poetry can only be made out of other poems.

—Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism