"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 this Salvador Dalí is going to accomplish today?"
- Salvador Felipe

"P.Halsman: Dalí, what makes you tick? Dalí: My hairspring, of course."

"P.Halsman: Dalí, why do you wear a mustache? Dalí: In order to pass unobserved."

"P.Halsman: Dalí, what is surrealism? Dalí: Surrealism is myself."

"At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since."

"Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making."

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

"Have no fear of perfection -- you'll never reach it."

"I believe that the moment is near when, by a procedure of active paranoic thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality."

"I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait."

"I don't take drugs: I am drugs."

"I have Dalínian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous."

"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."

"Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings."

"It is either easy or impossible."

"It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning."

"Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism - Money is a glory."

"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."

"Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality."

"Paranoiac-critical activity makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality..."

"So little of what could happen does happen."

"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."

"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."

"The only difference between myself and a madman, is that I am not mad!"

"The only thing that the world will not have enough of is exaggeration."

"The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret."

"The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents."

"The world will admire me. Perhaps I'll be despised and misunderstood, but I'll be a great genius, I'm certain of it."

"There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction."

"Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing."

"To gaze is to think."

"We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art."

"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, . . . to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdad's of his dreams to rise from the dust."

"When I was five years old I saw an insect that had been eaten by ants and of which nothing remained except the shell. Through the holes in its anatomy one could see the sky. Every time I wish to attain purity I look at the sky through flesh.

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