“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 desire to survive and the fear of death are artistic sentiments

For me, love must be ugly, looks must be divine, and death must be beautiful.

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

Many people do not reach their eighties because they spend too much time in their forties.

There comes a moment in every person’s life when they realise they adore me.

The sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad.

Great wine requires a mad man to grow the vine, a wise man to watch over it, a lucid poet to make it, and a lover to drink it.

When I paint, the Sea Roars Others Splash about in the bath.

Happy is he who causes a scandal.

Beauty should be edible, or not at all.

I am the first to be surprised and often terrified by the images that I see appear on my canvas.

Picasso is a communist. Neither am I.

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali.

Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.

I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I’m never served a cooked telephone.

Mustache? Mustache? Mustache?” Nobody dared to touch them. This was my test regarding the sacred aspect of mustaches.

I shouldn’t be saying this – high treason, really – but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren’t fooled by our accent into detecting brilliance that may not really be there.

It is the dialogue that lets the brilliance of the diamond’s infinite facets shine clearly. It is the dialogue that instills within us a power and capacity that is, and always has been, saturated with meaning.

What America demands in her black champions is a brilliant, powerful body and a dull, bestial mind.

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.

Simplicity is the key to brilliance.

We all have our moments of brilliance and glory.