“Don’t be afraid of perfection. You will never attain it!”

“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.”

“Painting is the beloved image that comes in through the eyes and flows out by the brush point – and love is the same thing!”

“The quicksands of automatism and dreams vanish upon awakening. But the rocks of the imagination still remain.”

“The specialised sciences of our time are concentrating on the study of the three constants of life: the sexual instinct, the sentiment of death, and the anguish of space-time.”

“After Freud it is the outer world, the world of physics, which will have to be eroticised and quantified.”

“It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary to know it myself.”

“Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary, rationalise 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.”

“If you are a mediocre, even if you make a great effort to paint very very badly, people will still see you are mediocre.”

“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 moment somebody very important or even semi-important dies, it gives me a feeling, which is at once intense, monstrous and reassuring, that this dead person has become 100 per cent Dalinian because from now on he will watch over the fulfilment of my work.”