“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.”

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.

The problem with the youth of today’ is that one is no longer part of it.

I do not believe in my death.

Everyone has sadness-I just get mine out in my music so that I can laugh and joke and flirt with you!

I live on a ranch in Texas and do my own thing. And I don’t care what anyone has to say about it. My joke is that the only people I’m trying to please are myself and my fans, because they’re the ones buying my records. And I have the best, most loyal fan base ever.

You name any horrific thing, and I can make a joke out of it.

It is not a sin to be seventy but it is also no joke.

I am a person. I am not a soap opera. There is never going to be a next [tabloid] installment about my life because my own stuff is my own stuff.

There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.

Many a truth is told in jest.

Do not mock a pain you have not endured.