Absurdists

"Sleeping is a way of dying or at least of dying to reality, better still it is the death of reality, but reality dies in love as in dreams. The life of man is entirely occupied by the bloody osmosis of dreams and love."

"Begin by drawing and painting like the old masters. After that do as you see fit - you will always be respected."

"If you refuse to study anatomy, the arts of drawing and perspective, the mathematics of aesthetics, and the science of color, let me tell you that this is more a sign of laziness than of genius."

"I think that the sweetest freedom for a man on earth consists in being able to live, if he likes, without having the need to work."

"And man's highest mission on earth is to spiritualize everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most. As a result, I increasingly dislike all scatological jokes and all forms of frivolity on this subject. Indeed, I am dumbfounded at how little philosophical and metaphysical importance the human mind has attached to the vital subject of excrement."

"- September 1952/the2nd/Again this morning, while I was on the toilet, I had a truly remarkable piece of insight. My bowel movement, by the way, was perfectly exceptional, smooth and odourless."

"- the 29th/Because of a very long fart, really a very long, and let us be frank, melodious fart, that I produced when I woke up, I was reminded of Michel de Montaigne. (DG p. 60)"

"July 1952/the 27th/This morning an exceptional defecation: two small turds in the shape of a rhinoceros horns. Such a scanty stool worries me. I would have thought the champagne, so alien to my routine, would have had a laxative effect. (DG p. 59)"

"Don't be afraid of perfection. You will never attain it!"

"Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid."

"The anagram 'Avida Dollars' was a talisman for me [referring to 'Divine Dali', so called by André Breton ]. It rendered the rain of dollars fluid, sweet and monotonous. Someday I shall tell the whole truth about the way in which this blessed disorder of Danae was garnered. It will be a chapter of a new book, probably my masterpiece: On the Life of Salvador Dali, considered as a Work of Art [never written]."

"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."

"Surrealism in its early period offered specific methods to bring images closer to concrete irrationality. These methods, based on the exclusive passive and receptive role of the 'surrealist subject', are bankrupt and are giving way to new surrealist methods for the systematic exploration of the irrational.. .The new delirious images of concrete irrationality suggest their physical, real 'possibility'; they go beyond the domain of psycho-analysable fantasies and 'virtual' representations.. .Against the dream memory and impossible, virtual images of purely receptive states that one can only recount, the physical facts of 'objective' irrationality with which one can already hurt oneself."

"The more I looked at his face [of Saint Sebastian] the more curious it seemed. That said, I seemed to have always known it and the aseptic morning light revealed its smallest details which such clarity, such purity, that I was impossible moved.. .In the upper part of the heliometer was St. Sebastian's magnifying glass.. .I put my eye to the magnifying glass, product of a slow distillation, at once numerical and intuitive. Each drop of water a number. Each drop of blood a geometry."

"Someone like myself, who claimed to be a real madman, living and organized with a Pythagorean precision.."

"It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself."

"This book ['Diary of a Genius', by Dali] will prove that that the daily life of a genius, his sleep, his digestion, his ecstasies, his nails, his colds, his blood, his life and death are essentially different from those of the rest of mankind."

"I categorically refused to consider the surrealists as just another literary and artistic group. I believed they were capable of liberating man from the tyranny of the 'practical, rational world'. I was going to become the Nietzsche of the irrational. I, the obsessed rationalist, was the only one who knew what I wanted: I was not going to submit to irrationality for its own sake, to the narcissist and passive irrationality others practiced. I would do completely the opposite. I would fight for the 'conquest of the irrational'. In the meantime my friends would let themselves be overwhelmed by the irrational, succumbing, like so many others, Nietzsche included, to that romantic weakness."

"I was never capable of being an average pupil. I would either seem refractory to any teaching and give the impression of being completely dumb or I would fling myself on my work with a frenzy, a patience, and a willingness to learn that astonished everybody. But to awaken my zeal, it was necessary to offer me something I liked. Once my appetite had been whetted, I became ravenously hungry."

"Democratic governments are not suited to the publication of the thunderous revelations I am in the habit of making. The unpublished parts will appear later.. ..when Europe will have restored its traditional monarchies."

"Ever since the French revolution there has developed a vicious, cretinizing tendency to consider a genius (apart from his work) as a human being more or less the same in every sense as other ordinary mortals. This is wrong. And if this is wrong for me, the genius of the greatest spiritual order or our day, a true modern genius, it is even more wrong when applied to those who incarnated the almost divine genius of the Renaissance, such as Raphael."

"Telephone, pedal washbasin, white refrigerators gleaming with Ripolin [French paint], bidet, small phonograph.. ..objects of authentic and pure poetry (MPC p. 11).. ..The Parthenon was not built as a ruin. It was built on a new surface without patina, like our automobiles. / we will not always bear on our shoulders the weight of our father's corpse."

"Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic."

"Men who fuck easily, and can give themselves without difficulty, have only a very diminished creative potency.. .Look at Leonardo da Vinci, Hitler, Napoleon, they all left their mark on their times, and they were more or less impotent."

"Let us illuminate my political positions. I have always been against any affiliation.. .I am the only Surrealist who always refused to be part of any organization whatsoever. I was never a Stalinist, nor fooled by any association. Illustrious members of the Falange [Spanish ultra-right wing] I never got involved.. .If I accepted the Grand Cross of Isabella the Catholic from Franco's [Spanish fascist dictator] hands, it is because in Soviet Russia I was not awarded the Lenin Prize."

"Let us watch this de Kooning [leading Abstract-Expressionist painter in New York] with his prematurely white hair making his great sleepwalker's movements, as though he was waiting in a dream to open bays of Biscay, to explode islands like pieces of orange or Parma violets, to tear continents from a cerulean blue split by oceans of Naples yellow.. ..if by good or by ill fortune, in the middle of this Dionysian demiurg the image of The Eternal Feminine should appear.. the least that might have happened to her would be that she should emerge (from all this chaos) wearing nothing but a little make-up."

"Popularity, even at its most mediocre, delights me.. .I behave nicely with the public, out of the same concern for prudence that makes me generous in cases of epidemics or other collective calamities.. .Beware, I tell myself, because you may be judged at the end of the time, if there is an end of time and a judge.. .Beware of the day when no one ask you for anything anymore, be nice with the cratinization of advertising.. .Any reflection of my existence in others clams my worries about the feeble degree of reality of things, the world and myself. It's from all these eyes, in which I see myself seen, that I take my substance.. ..but where is substance? If it is not in nature it can't be in God.. .In a reality that endlessly disperses before the eye, fades away between our fingers, the only really material matter, the only really substantial substance, would be God."

"When I have at last become like a statue through the exacerbation of my ego which has led me to this ultimate sclerosis.. .Then and only then will I at last be able to set this statue up and come out of myself into the crowd to go and see the world. No one will notice anything because they will all be looking at the statue and I will be able to go about, free at last.. .It's then that I shall realize my eternal dream: to become a newspaper reporter!"

"In the Surrealist period, I wanted to create the iconography of the interior world and the world of the marvelous, of my father Freud. Today, the exterior world and that of physics has transcended the one of psychology. My father today is Dr. Heisenberg."

"[I]f you want to ensure for yourself a prominent place in Society you must [...] give it a violent kick in the right leg."

"Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dalí."

"The H-bomb is coming out of my intuitive and inspirationic command, for my spirit speaketh and speaketh psychologically, intuitively, and inspirationally and guides the destinies of the nations of the earth.. .My Assumption is the opposite of the atomic bomb. Instead of disintegration of matter, we have the integration, the reconstitution of the real and glorious body of the Virgin in the heavens."

"In 1951 the two most subversive things that could happen to an ex-surrealist were: firstly, to become a mystic and secondly, to know how to draw. These two models of rigour happened to me at the same time."

"In the first place, in 1950, I had a 'cosmic dream' in which I saw this image in colour and which in my dream represented the 'nucleus of the atom.' This nucleus later took on a metaphysical sense; I considered it 'the very unity of the universe,' the Christ!"

"Myself at the age of six, when I believed I was a little girl, raising with a very great care the skin of the sea in order to observe a dog sleeping in the shadow of the water."

"Just now I'm painting a beautiful woman, smiling, burnt to a crisp, with feathers of all colors, held up by a small die of burning marble; the die is in turn held up by a little puff of smoke, churned and quite; in the sky there are asses with parrot-heads, grasses and beach sand, all about to explode, all clean, incredible objective.."

"Bread has always been one of the oldest subjects of fetishism and obsession in my work, the first and the one to which I have remained the most faithful. I painted the same subject 19 years ago 'Basket of Bread, 1929'. By making a very careful comparison of the two pictures, everyone can study all the history of painting right there, from the linear charm of primitivism to stereoscopic hyper-aestheticism."

"Surrealism will at least have served to give experimental proof that total sterility and attempts at automatizations have gone too far and have led to a totalitarian system.. .Today's laziness and the total lack of technique have reached their paroxysm in the psychological signification of the current use of the college [= collage]."

"What is an elegant woman? An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and who has no hair under her arms."

"It ['The Great Masturbator', 1929] represented a large head, yellow like wax, with very red cheeks, long eyelashes and an imposing nose compressed against the ground. This face had no mouth, and in place of the mouth an enormous lobster was hooked. The lobster's belly was decomposing and full of ants. Some of these ants were scurrying through the space that would have been occupied by the non-existent mouth of the great anguished face, whose head ended in 1900-style architecture and ornamentation. The title of the painting was The Great Masturbator."

"In that privileged place, reality and the sublime dimension almost come together. My mystical paradise begins in the plains of the Empordà, is surrounded by the Alberes hills, and reaches plenitude in the bay of Cadaqués. This land is my permanent inspiration. The only place in the world, too, where I feel loved. When I painted that rock that I entitled 'The Great Masturbator', I did nothing more than render homage to one of the promontories of my kingdom, and my painting was a hymn to one of the jewels of my crown."

"From the moment I arrived in Cadaqués [Summer of 1929] I was assailed by a resurgence of my childhood period. The six years of secondary school, the three years in Madrid and the trip I had just made to Paris, all totally faded into the background, while all the fantasies and representations of my childhood period came back to take victorious possession of my mind."

"Having reached the surface [in the Paris' Metro] I remained crazed for a long time, gathering my spirits. I had the impression that I had been vomited by a monstrous anus after being tumultuously brewed by an intestine. I did not know where I was; as though spat out on to unknown land, a pointless little excrement.. .And, a miracle!.. .This shock was a beneficial revelation. One must at every opportunity use the subterranean paths of action and thought, erase the traces, appear suddenly and irrelevantly, endless conquer oneself, never hesitate to sodomize one's soul so that it will be reborn purer and stronger than ever."

"We know today that form is always the product of an inquisitorial process of matter – the specific reaction of matter when subjected to the terrible coercion of space choking it on all sides, pressing and squeezing it out, producing the swellings that burst form it life to the exact limits of the rigorous contours of its own originality of reaction."

"Paranoiac-critical activity is an organizing and productive force of objective chance. Paranoiac-critical activity no longer considers surrealist phenomena and images by themselves but, on the contrary, as a coherent whole of systematic and significant relations."

"It is a question of the systematic and interpretive organization of the sensational, scattered and narcissist surrealist experimental material, - that is to say, of everyday surrealist events:,br>nocturnal pollution, false recollection, dream, diurnal fantasy, the concrete transformation of nocturnal phosphene into a hypnagogic image or of "waking phosphene" into an objective image, - the nutritive caprice, - inter-uterine claims, - anamorphic hysteria, - the voluntary retention of the urine, - the involuntary retention of insomnia - the fortuitous image of exclusively exhibitionist tendency, -the incomplete action, - the frantic manner, - the regional sneeze, the anal wheelbarrow, the minimal mistake, the liliputian malaise, the super-normal physiological state, - the picture one leaves off painting, that which one paints, the territorial ringing of the telephone, "the deranging image", etc., etc., all these things, I say, and a thousand other instantaneous or successive sollicitations, revealing a minimum of irrational intentionalety or, on the contrary, a minimum of suspect phenomenal nullity, are associated, by the mechanisms of paranoiac-critical activity, in an indestructible delirious-interpretive system of political problems, paralytic images, more or less mammiferous questions, playing the role of the obsessing idea."

"It was in 1929 that Salvador Dali [Dali is writing about himself] brought his attention to hear upon the internal mechanism of paranoiac phenomena and envisaged the possibility of an experimental method based on the sudden power of the systematic associations proper to paranoia; this method afterwards became the delirio-critical synthesis which hears the name of "paranoiac-critical activity". Paranoia: delirium of interpretive association bearing a systematic structure. Paranoiac-critical activity: spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based upon the interpretive-critical association of delirious phenomena."

"The essays in simulation of [Paul] Eluard and [Andre] Breton, Breton's recent poem-objects, the latest images of Rene Magritte, the "method" of the latest sculpture of Picasso and the theoretic and pictorial activity of Salvador Dali prove this need of concrete materialisation in current reality, of giving objective value on the real plane to the delirious unknown world of our irrational experiences. Against the remembrance of dreams and the virtual and impossible images of purely receptive states, "that can only be recounted", there are the physical facts of "objective" irrationality, with which one can already actually wound oneself."

"Surrealism in its first period offered specific methods for approaching the images of concrete irrationality. These methods, based on the exclusively passive and receptive role of the surrealist subject, are now [1935] in liquidation and giving place to new surrealist methods of systematic exploration of the irrational."

"In the degree that the images of concrete irrationality approach phenomenal reality, the corresponding means of expression approach those of the great realist painters - Velasquez and Vermeer of Delft - to paint realistically according to irrational thought, according to the unknown imagination."