All Quotes

"- Most of my readers will have felt the sensation of suddenly falling into the void, just at the point when sleep is going to take them over completely. Waking up with a start, your heart convulsively trembling, you don't always realize that this sensation of vertigo is a reminiscence of the expulsion of being born.. .All those who throw themselves into the void have at bottom only one desire, to be reborn at any price."

"A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money."

"I will return and I will be millions."

"It is difficult to hold the world's interest for more than half an hour at a time.. .I have been successful for twenty years, to the extent that papers publish the most incomprehensible new items of our time, sent by teletype: PARIS. Dali gave lecture at Sorbonne on Vermeer's paintings 'lacemaker' and the rhinoceros.. ..NEW YORK. Dali landed in New York dressed in a golden space-suit."

"Surrounded by countless people who murmur my name and call me 'maître', I am about to inaugurate the exhibition of my one hundred illustrations of the Divine Comedy at the Galliera Museum."

"Le Surréalisme, c'est moi."

"Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad."

"Every time I lose a little sperm I'm convinced I've wasted it. I always feel guilty afterwards.. .To start with, I'm not as impotent as all that."

"The pleasure of the flesh can be fulfilled only if a particular dimension is created, a kind of stereoscopic phenomenon, an imaginary hologram as real as reality.. .I need all these suddenly present images of my past that forms the fabric of my entire life."

"My supreme game is to imagine myself dead, devoured by worms. I close my eyes and, with incredible details of absolute, scatological precision, I see myself being slowly eaten and digested by an infernal swarm of large greenish maggots gorging themselves on my flesh."

"But I very early realized, instinctively, my life formula: to get others to accept as natural the excesses of one's personality an thus to relieve oneself of his own anxieties by creating a sort of collective participation."

"Death is the thing I am most afraid of, and the resurrection of the flesh, a great Spanish theme, is the one that it is hardest for me to accept, from the point of view of.. ..life."

"..the paint marks [in Impressionist paintings] placed apparently without order and which suddenly became magnificently ordered if one knew how to make the right distance.. ..to communicate a deep, sun-drenched image of a stream, landscape or face.. ..My eyes were popping out of my head."

"Shit scared them [the Surrealists]. Shit and arseholes. Yet, what was more human and more needful of transcending! From that moment, I know I would keep on obsessing them with what they most dreaded. And when I invented Surrealist objects, I had the deep inner fulfillment of knowing, while the [Surrealist] group went into ecstasies over their operation, that these objects very exactly reproduced the contradictions of a rectal sphincter at work, so that what they were thus admiring was their own fear."

"I am capable of projecting myself into my little inner cinema.. .I free myself through a secret exit from the attempts to encircle my soul."

"In the subconscious you fuck ugly people, never beautiful, because the libido always desires something repulsive."

"I like it, murder, because this is courage. It is anti-bourgeois. Murder is closer to heaven, because after becoming 'remords de conscience', one prays, one opens the sky, and the angels say, 'Good morning'!"

"You know the worst thing is freedom. Freedom of any kind is the worst for creativity. You know, Dalí spent two months in jail in Spain, and these two months were the most enjoyable and happy in my life. Before my jail period, I was always nervous, anxious. I didn't know if I should make a drawing, or perhaps make a poem, or go to the movies or the theater, or catch a girl, or play with the boys. The people put me in jail, and my life became divine. Tremendous!"

"Ah, UNESCO is the most garbage. Any kind of organization for the good will of the people is impossible. It is necessary for the contrary. Young people need plenty of difficulties to achieve something, you know? If you receive a little money for this, a little money for that, everything becomes mediocre, and collapses ig-no-min-i-ously!"

"I don't do drugs. I am drugs."

"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 can say without fear of falling into the slightest exaggeration that each outline of a rock, / and / of the beaches of Cadaques [in North-Spain, where Dali spent his childhood], each of the geological anomalies of its landscape and its unique light I know by heart, for in the paths of my wandering solitudes, it was these silhouettes of stones and its states of light attached to the structure / and the aesthetic substance / of the landscape that were the sole protagonists on the mineral impossibility of which I project day after day all the accumulated and chronically unsatisfied tension of my erotic-emotional life."

"When you are a genius, you do not have the right to die, because we are necessary for the progress of humanity.."

"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."

"Dali has endowed Surrealism with an instrument of primary importance, in particular the paranoiaccritical method, which has immediately shown itself capable of being applied equally to painting, poetry, the cinema, to the construction of typical surrealist objects, to fashion, to sculpture, to the history of art and even, if necessary, to all manner of exegesis."

"I love my cigar, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while!"

"Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing."

"What a wonderful thing it is for an artist [Dali] to find exactly the right wife [Gala] for him. This must only happen once in a hundred times only. It has happened to Dali and I think it is going to make the entire difference to his career - in fact all the difference between him remaining an interesting phenomenon of a distorted decade or in him becoming one of the two or three leading figures of the coming age."

"I have been inclined to regard the Surrealists as complete fools, but that young Spaniard with his candid, fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery, has changed my estimate."

"The art of Salvador Dalí, an extreme metaphor at a time when only the extreme will do, constitutes a body of prophecy about ourselves unequaled in accuracy since Freud's Civilization And Its Discontents. Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our fears and longings, and our need to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game — these diseases of the psyche Dali has diagnosed with dismaying accuracy. His paintings not only anticipate the psychic crisis which produced our glaucous paradise, but document the uncertain pleasures of living within it. The great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century — sex and paranoia — preside over his life, as over ours."

"Divine Dali!"

"Surprisingly, Dalí said that his soft watches [in his painting 'The Persistence of Memory', 1931 were not inspired by the theory of relativity, but by the surrealist perception of a Camembert cheese melting in the sun. The painter insisted on this explanation in his reply letter to Prigogine, who took it as Dalí's reaction to Einstein's coldly mathematical theory."

"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

""Hell is just a frame of mind": widely claimed on the internet to be a quotation from Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. The demon Mephistopheles in Doctor Faustus does, however, imply a similar idea by saying that losing his place in heaven makes him experience hell, by comparison, wherever he is:"

"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."

"The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious"

""I don't think we're in Kansas anymore, Toto.", Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz (played by Judy Garland)"

""In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things, charity" (In necessariis unitas, in non-necessariis [or, dubiis] libertas, in utrisque [or, omnibus] caritas)."

""A stupid person's idea of a clever person", Julie Burchill of Stephen Fry."

""Not many people know that.", Michael Caine, British actor."

""Nice guys finish last." Leo Durocher (1906–1991), US baseball manager."

""The two most common elements in the Universe are Hydrogen and Stupidity." Harlan Ellison (born May 27, 1934), US author."

""I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" Voltaire"

""To learn who rules over you, simply find out whom you are not allowed to criticize." Voltaire"

""If I can't dance I don't want to be in [or a part of] your revolution." (also: "If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution")"

"Just the facts, ma'am."

"We trained hard... but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization."

""Elementary, my dear Watson" – Sherlock Holmes"

"The end justifies the means."

"There's a sucker born every minute."