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.
There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.
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.
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.
It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.
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.
Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
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.
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.
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 paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.
Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.
Let my enemies devour each other.
Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory.
Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.
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.
The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.
There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.
There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.
Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.
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.
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?’
I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.
Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.
Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.
God invented man, and man invented the metric system.
I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.
I have Dalínian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.
