This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.
People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.
My art is capable of liberating man from the tyranny of the ‘practical, rational world.
What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.
Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.
Knowing how to look is a way of inventing.
I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.
The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.
I don't do drugs. I am drugs.
Let my enemies devour each other.
I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.
There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.
Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory.
In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.
Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.
It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.
I want to perceive and understand the hidden powers and laws of things, in order to have them in my power.
I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.
My mother's death supervened, and this was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her... I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul.
Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating: It is either good or bad.
I am not strange. I am just not normal.
The fact I myself do not understand what my paintings mean while I am painting them does not imply that they are meaningless.
Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.
Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.
The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.
So little of what could happen does happen.
I tried sex once with a woman and it was Gala. It was overated. I tried sex once with a man and that man was the famous juggler Frederico Garcia Lorca. It was very painful.
If I'm going to be anything more than average, if anyone is going to remember me, then I need to go further, in art, in life, in everything!
You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.
Life is too short to remain unnoticed.
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.
If you understand a painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.
Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
Painter, paint!
Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy – the joy of being Salvador Dalí – and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?
Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.
The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad.
Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.
We must always remember that the Chinese revolution was not a peasant's revolution, but one of the extreme Right.
I dedicate this novel to Gala, who was constantly by my side while I was writing it, who was the good fairy of my equilibrium, who banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of certainties...
Happy is he who causes a scandal.
This is very important because I work constantly in the moment of sleep. All of my best ideas come through my dreams.
I never took drugs, because I am drugs.
If you understand your painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.
Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.
The sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad!
The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.
I shall be so brief that I have already finished.
Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.
