In those days, a man at least as boring as I, Pierre Reverdy, was writing: 'The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be–the greater its emotional power and poetic reality...' (in the Nord-Sud, March 1918). These words, however sibylline for the uninitiated, were extremely revealing, and I pondered them for a long time.

Le Manifeste du Surréalisme (Manifesto of Surrealism; 1924)