Dali Quotes

Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you. ~ Salvador Dali

The famous soft watches are nothing else than the tender, extravagant, solitary, paranoic-critical camembert oftime and space. ~ Salvador Dali

The only difference between me and a madman is I'm not mad. ~ Salvador Dali

When we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another. ~ Salvador Dali

Butterflies were small and light, and very magic sensitive. For some reason I made them feel safe and they gravitated to me like iron shavings to a magnet. They ruined my ferocious badass image, but you'd have to be a complete beast to swat butterflies. ~ Ilona Andrews

Wearing Deni's huge vicuna coat with the si cap over my ears, in cold biting winds of December New York, Irwin and Simon led me up to the Russian Tea Room to meet Salvador Dali.
He was sitting with his chin on a finely decorated tile headed cane, blue and white, next to his wife at the Cafe table. He had a cane, blue and white, next to his wife at the Cafe table. He had a little wax moustache, thin. When the waiter asked him what he wanted he said 'One grapefruit...peenk!' and he had big blue eyes like a baby, a real or Spaniard. He told us no artist was great unless he made money. Was he talking about Uccello, Ghianondri, Franca? We didn't even know what money really was or what to do with it. Dali had already read an article about the 'insurgent' 'beats' and was interested. When Irwin told him (in Spanish) we wanted to meet Marlon Brando (who ate in this Russian Tea Room) he said, waving three fingers at me, 'He is more beautiful than M. Brando.'
I wondered why he said that but he probably had a tiff with old Marlon. But what he meant was my eyes, which were blue, like his, and my hair, which is black, like his, and when I looked into his eyes, and he looked into my eyes, we couldn't stand all that sadness. In fact, when Dali and I look in the mirror we can't stand all that sadness. To Dali sadness is beautiful. ~ Jack Kerouac

If I'm doing a logo, I'll do it in black and white. Once the form is feeling right, only then do I start exploring the color palettes. A good example was the process of rebranding the Salvador Dali Museum. I did at least 100 versions in black and white. ~ David Carson

That's what dreams are really like, you know? They're not full of melting clocks or floating roses or people made out of rocks. Most of the time, dreams look just like the normal world. It's your feelings that tell you something's off. Not your mind, not your intellect, not something as obvious as that. The only part of you that really knows what's going on is the part of you that's most a mystery. If that's not Surrealism, I don't know what is. ~ Amy Reed

All of my knowledge, of both science and religion, I incorporate into the classical tradition of my painting. ~ Salvador Dali

There was something written in pencil in the bottom corner, smudged and faded. I leaned in until my nose was almost pressed against the glass. Narnia, it looked like.
I must have stared for a lot longer than it seemed.
A tap on the door had my jumping. "Ella?" A second later. "Um...Ella? You okay in there?"
Alex looked red-faced and startled when I jerked the door open. Even more so when I grabbed his wrist with both of my hands and pulled him into the bathroom. Another time,I might have been equally red-faced. I would definitely have been uncomfortable, even if it wasn't in a bad way. But at the moment,I was too busy in a different part of my head.
I let go of him and pointed to the sketch. "That's a Willing."
"Is it?" He didn't look particularly impressed. More relieved that I hadn't fallen and hit my head or had some similar mishap.
"Edward Willing. You have to know who Edward Willing is."
He peered past me. "Philadelphia painter. Early twentieth century, right? I was in your art history class last year,you know."
I didn't.Not really. "You were?"
"I sat in back.You sat in front. Never saw your face during class,but I remember you arguing with Evers about Dali.I remember. You don't like Dali."
"Not much."
"You like this guy?"
"Yeah." I took a breath. "Yeah.I do. And you have one of his sketches. In your guest bathroom. ~ Melissa Jensen

God is just another artist, like me. ~ Salvador Dali

Dalí painted melting clocks. I suppose if he'd asked around first, quizzed people if they wanted to see a picture of a melting clock, the answer might have been something obvious, like 'Clocks don't melt!' But, lucky for us, Salvador didn't care what anyone else thought. You use what moves you. ~ Laura Ruby

Happy is he who causes a scandal ~ Salvador Dali

And now the announcement of Watson and Crick about DNA. This is for me the real proof of the existence of God. ~ Salvador Dali

There comes a moment in every person's life when they realise they adore me. ~ Salvador Dali

The Dali Lama and other notable Buddhist teachers have now indicated that since the world has plunged into a dark age, the information available in the tantras, which include the very, very powerful Kundalini release techniques, should be made available to the public. ~ Frederick Lenz

Everything alters me, but nothing changes me. ~ Salvador Dali

Spain's past is a cut of meat turning green on the butcher's slab. When the war ended, people were forbidden to look back and see the circling flies. Soon they found themselves unable to turn their heads, discovering that there was no language permitted for their pain. But the paintings at least, remain: Gernica, the works of Dali and Miro ... pg 339 ~ Jessie Burton

If I had a Salvador Dali painting, I would cuddle it to sleep. ~ Mac Miller

We must always remember that the Chinese revolution was not a peasant's revolution, but one of the extreme Right. ~ Salvador Dali

Who knows how to taste wine never drinks wine again, but tastes secrets instead ~ Salvador Dali

I tried sex once with a woman and that woman was Gala. It was overrated. I tried sex once with a man and that man was the famous juggler Federico Garcia Lorca [the Spanish Surrealist poet]. It was very painful. ~ Salvador Dali

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art. ~ Salvador Dali

An unpredictable, faithful and objective hazard seems to have systematically singled out my life to make what are normally uneventful incidents violent, phenomenal and memorable. ~ Salvador Dali

If I'm going to be anything more than average, if anyone is going to remember me, then I need to go further, in art, in life, in everything! ~ Salvador Dali

Photographic fantasy: more agile and faster in discoveries than murky subconscious processes! ~ Salvador Dali

I dedicate this novel to Gala, who was constantly by my side while I was writing it, who was the good fairy of my equilibrium, who banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of certainties ... ~ Salvador Dali

Dali dreamed of Hitler as a white-skinned girl- impossibly pale, luminous and lifeless as the moon. ~ Dana Gioia

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. ~ Salvador Dali

Man cannot change or escape his time. The eye sees the present and the future ~ Salvador Dali

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality. ~ Salvador Dali

In an age like our own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a claim for the artist, however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear. And, after all, the worst crimes are not always the punishable ones. By encouraging necrophilic reveries one probably does quite as much harm as by, say, picking pockets at the races. One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, "This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman." Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being. ~ George Orwell

I like Dali and Magritte. I also like the Scottish artist John Byrne, another surrealist. ~ Billy Connolly

I am very sorry, but I am infinitely more intelligent than these three professors, and I therefore refuse to be examined by them. I know more about Raphael than all of you altogether. ~ Salvador Dali

Picasso is a painter, so am I; Picasso is Spanish, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I. ~ Salvador Dali

If you refuse to study anatomy, the arts of drawing and perspective, the mathematics of aesthetics, and the science of color, let me tell you that this is more a sign of laziness than of genius. ~ Salvador Dali

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. ~ Salvador Dali

Is there anything in the legends about a topaz called the Wolf Diamond? A large yellow gem maybe?" I asked. Dali wrinkled her forehead. "Topaz is associated with Brihaspati - Jupiter." "The Roman god?" Jim frowned. "No, the planet. Honestly, Jim, the world doesn't revolve around the Greco-Roman pantheon. ~ Ilona Andrews

I was thinking about what a magical portal this lobby was when the heavy glass door opened as if swept by wind and a familiar figure in a black and scarlet cape entered. It was Salvador Dali. He looked around the lobby nervously, and then, seeing my crow, smiled. He placed his elegant, bony hand atop my head and said: You are like a crow, a gothic crow. ~ Patti Smith

I am a prostitute. I don't want to know the client. I just want money, lots of money. My seed rises into the glorious eruption of a majestic orgasm when I picture the Divine Dali rolling in money. - Salvador Dalí ~ Carlos Lozano

Where is everybody?"
"Hiding," she said. "Except for Doolittle. He was excused from the chewing-out due to having been kidnapped. He's napping now like he doesn't have a care in the world. I got to hear all sorts of interesting stuff through the door."
"Give."
She shot me a sly smile. "First, I got to listen to Jim's 'it's all my fault; I did it all by myself' speech. Then I got to listen to Derek's 'it's all my fault and I did it all by myself' speech. Then Curran promised that the next person who wanted to be a martyr would get to be one. Then Raphael made a very growling speech about how he was here for a blood debt. It was his right to have restitution for the injury caused to the friend of the boudas; it was in the damn clan charter on such and such page. And if Curran wanted to have an issue with it, they could take it outside. It was terribly dramatic and ridiculous. I loved it."
I could actually picture Curran sitting there, his hand on his forehead above his closed eyes, growling quietly in his throat.
"Then Dali told him that she was sick and tired of being treated like she was made out of glass and she wanted blood and to kick ass."
That would do him in. "So what did he say?"
"He didn't say anything for about a minute and then he chewed them out. He told Derek that he'd been irresponsible with Livie's life, and that if he was going to rescue somebody, the least he could do is to have a workable plan, instead of a poorly thought-ou ~ Ilona Andrews

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

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

I think that the sweetest freedom for a man on earth consists in being able to live, if he likes, without having the need to work. ~ Salvador Dali

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing. ~ Salvador Dali

People looked at me, shocked.
I gave them a nice big smile. That's right, look what big teeth I have. I knew I was a vegetarian, but aside from Jim and a few friends, nobody else did. Besides, just because I didn't eat meat, didn't mean I wouldn't bite. ~ Ilona Andrews

I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly. ~ Salvador Dali

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

One thing which I can't stress enough is thaft OCD is completely nonsensical and will not listen to reason. This is one of the most frightening things about having it. I knew that t
o anyone I told, there are Salvador Dali paintings that make more sense. ~ Joe Wells

Sometimes you're quite fortunate, being on the stage, getting to meet people like Salvador Dali. ~ Bryan Ferry

Geniuses must never die, the progress of mankind depends on us ~ Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali was much too intelligent to be a great painter. And he knew it. ~ Jean-Michel Rene Souche

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die. ~ Salvador Dali

Photographic data ... is still and ESSENTIALLY THE SAFEST POETIC MEDIUM and the most agile process for catching the most delicate osmoses which exist between reality and surreality. The mere fact of photographic transposition means a total invention: the capture of a secret reality. ~ Salvador Dali

Where is automatism in the work of Chirico or Tanguy? Even Dali had to renounce it in order to be able to organize the space of the canvas according to the combined laws of dreams and pictorial aesthetics. ~ Dumitru Tepeneag

Dali had a good sense of humor - obviously you could tell just looking at him; he was funny. ~ Joe Grant

Just as I am astonished that a bank clerk never eats a cheque, so too am I astonished that no painter before me ever thought of painting a soft watch. ~ Salvador Dali

It is mostly with your blood, Gala that I paint my pictures ~ Salvador Dali

Hail to the Beast Lord! I waved my spatula for emphasis.
Jim spared me an ugly look and turned to Dali. ~ Ilona Andrews

Forever will be you and me. ~ Salvador Dali

The world of the cinema and of painting are very different; precisely, the possibilities of photography and the cinema reside in that unlimited fantasy which is born of things themselves ... a piece of sugar can become on the screen larger than an infinite perspective of gigantic buildings. ~ Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali and fifty cents will get you a cup of clock melt. ~ Tom Robbins

Whatever happens, my audience mustn't know whether I am spoofing or being serious; and likewise I mustn't know either. I am in a constant interrogation; when does the deep and philosophically valid Dali begin, and where does the looney and preposterous Dali end? ~ Salvador Dali

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

You need to neuter him. Otherwise he'll spray all over the house. The stench is awful. And when he isn't out catting around, little female cats in heat will show up and wail under the windows."
Kill me, please. "He is a nice cat. He's not like that."
"It's instinct, Dali. Before you know it, you'll be running a feline whorehouse. ~ Ilona Andrews

Minutes passed by. A little blue butterfly landed on my nose. I blinked at it and it fluttered to my ear. A big yellow butterfly gently floated over and landed on my paw. Soon a whole swarm of them floated up and down around me, like a swirl of multicolored petals. It happened in my backyard, too, if the magic was strong enough. Butterflies were small and light, and very magic sensitive. For some reason I made them feel safe and they gravitated to me like iron shavings to a magnet. They ruined my ferocious badass image, but you'd have to be a complete beast to swat butterflies.
If a baby deer frolicked out from between the buildings trying to cuddle up, I would roar. I wouldn't bite it, but I would roar. I had my limits. ~ Ilona Andrews

The desire to survive and the fear of death are artistic sentiments ~ Salvador Dali

Right now I'm the greatest. I don't say this through vanity. It's just that the rest are so bad. ~ Salvador Dali

New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me, and that was young, virgin, and without drama, that of America. I traveled in America, but instead of romantically and directly rubbing the snakeskin of my body against the asperities of its terrain, I preferred to peel protected within the armor of the gleaming black crustacean of a Cadillac which I gave Gala as a present. Nevertheless all the men who admire and the women who are in love with my old skin will easily be able to find its remnants in shredded pieces of various sizes scattered to the winds along the roads from New York via Pittsburgh to California. I have peeled with every wind; pieces of my skin have remained caught here and there along my way, scattered through that "promised land" which is America; certain pieces of this skin have remained hanging in the spiny vegetation of the Arizona desert, along the trails where I galloped on horseback, where I got rid of all my former Aristotelian "planetary notions." Other pieces of my skin have remained spread out like tablecloths without food on the summits of the rocky masses by which one reaches the Salt Lake, in which the hard passion of the Mormons saluted in me the European phantom of Apollinaire. Still other pieces have remained suspended along the "antediluvian" bridge of San Francisco, where I saw in passing the ten thousand most beautiful virgins in America, completely naked, standing in line on ~ Salvador Dali

I am not strange. I am just not normal. ~ Salvador Dali

There was no sign of life round the domed emplacement of the Moonraker, and the concrete, already beginning to shimmer in the early morning sun, stretched emptily away towards Deal. It looked like a newly laid aerodome or rather, he thought, with its three disparate concrete 'things', the beehive dome,the flat-iron blast-wall, and the distant cube of the firing point, each casting black pools of shadow towards him in the early sun, like a Dali desert landscape in which three objets trouves reposed at carefully calculated random. ~ Ian Fleming

Schiaparelli's collaborations with Dali and Cocteau as well as Prada's Fondazione Prada push art and fashion ever closer, in a direct, synergistic, and culturally redefining relationship. ~ Thomas P. Campbell

Dali blinked at me. "Would you mind making coffee while you're dancing? I smell it on the bottom shelf, either first or second jar on the left."
I opened the first jar and looked inside. Coffee. The label said BORAX. "What's up with the labels?"
Dali shrugged. "You're in the house of a cat whose job is to spy. He thinks he's clever. I'd be careful with the silverware drawer. There might be a bomb in it. ~ Ilona Andrews

You need a name."
I covered the receiver for a moment. "We need a team name."
"Hunters," Raphael said.
"Valiant Knights of the Fur," Dali said.
"Justice Group," Jim said. "Since Justice League is taken."
"Fools." Doolittle shook his head.
"Fools," I said into the receiver. ~ Ilona Andrews

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. ~ Salvador Dali

Dali likes me taking his picture because he is interested in pictures that do not simply reproduce reality. Even in photos he prefers to appear outside reality .That is surrealistic! ~ Philippe Halsman

Young people need plenty of difficulties to achieve something ... If you receive a little money for this, a little money for that, everything becomes mediocre, and collapses ignominiously. ~ Salvador Dali

My mother's death supervened, and this was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her ... I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul. ~ Salvador Dali

Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul - let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin! ~ Salvador Dali

When you see Hitler burning paintings by Salvador Dali and Picasso he's telling you that this time period and these men and this culture didn't exist, and I've seen that happen in other countries, Sudan for instance, it's not enough to kill them you have to destroy all of their markings that they left that was their history. ~ George Clooney

I do not believe in my death. ~ Salvador Dali

Salvador Dalí's aberrations are partly explicable. Perhaps they are a way of assuring himself that he is not commonplace. The two qualities that Dali unquestionably possesses are a gift for drawing and an atrocious egoism. 'At seven', he says in the first paragraph of his book, 'I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.' This is worded in a deliberately startling way, but no doubt it is substantially true. Such feelings are common enough. 'I knew I was a genius', somebody once said to me, 'long before I knew what I was going to be a genius about. ~ George Orwell

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

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without winds. ~ Salvador Dali

Precaution the Cuticle of a Grand Piano. Modern art [by Salvador Dali]. ~ Joan Wehlen Morrison

[I am a] contradictory and paradoxical man. ~ Salvador Dali

The problem with the youth of today' is that one is no longer part of it. ~ Salvador Dali

The two greatest strokes of luck that can happen to a painter are (1) to be Spanish, (2) to be called Dali ~ Salvador Dali

Life is too short to remain unnoticed ~ Salvador Dali

Dali was the great painter then and surrealism was a way of life. ~ Vincente Minnelli

All in Dali is indeed contrived, a brilliant illustration of his own psyche as he understands it, as opposed to how it truly may have been. ~ Wendy Beckett

The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret. ~ Salvador Dali

All of my heroes, like Dali, are people who pioneered various forms of cinema. ~ Marilyn Manson

I never took drugs, because I am drugs ~ Salvador Dali

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

The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents. ~ Salvador Dali

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

From 17 to 21, I was obsessed by sport and art. In art, I loved the pre-Raphaelites and Rembrandt first. Then I discovered Salvador Dali, and it was like finding something I already knew. ~ Anthony Browne

I didn't like Dali: now, like you, I do. Like you, I began to drink my Coke with a pinch of salt . Like you, I stopped bothering about ironed clothes. Like you, I sit with a dictionary while reading the papers. Like you, I sit on the compound wall after a bath. ~ Sachin Kundalkar

My point is, I would never hurt you or your family."
I raised my chin at him. "If you tried to hurt my mother, I would totally kick your ass."
"Aha."
"Yes. You would be lying on the ground, crying, 'No more, no more,' and I would be kicking you in the stomach, wham, wham, wham!"
He laughed softly. ~ Ilona Andrews