Salvador Dali: "Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams"!

• "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".

• "If you understand a painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it".

• "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".

• "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".

• "The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture".

• "I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it".

• "To gaze is to think".

• "Let my enemies devour each other".

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

• "No masterpiece was ever created by a lazy artist".

• "When I paint, the ocean roars. Others merely paddle in their bath".

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

• "Oh, Salvador, Now you know the truth; if you act the genius you will be one".

• "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".

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

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

• "Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings".

• "God invented man, and man invented the metric system".

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

• "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".

• "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".

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

• "This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art".

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

• "It is either easy or impossible".

• "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".

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

• "There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad".

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

• "There's no greater bliss in life than when the plumber eventually comes to unblock your drains. No writer can give that sort of pleasure".

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

• "Picasso is a communist. Neither am I".

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

• "So little of what could happen does happen".

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

• "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".

• "God is just another artist, like me".

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

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

• "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 Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust".

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

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

• "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".

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