“It is either easy or impossible.”
“This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.”
“Have no fear of perfection-you'll never reach it.”
“Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.”
“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”
“The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.”
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.”
“There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.”
“The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.”
“I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.”
“There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.”
“I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.”
“I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.”
“Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.”
“Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.”
“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 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.”
“It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 Baghdad's of his dreams to rise from the dust.”