Salvador Dali Quotes

This is what art is all about. It is weaving fabric from the feathers you have plucked from your own breast. But no one must ever see the process - only the finished bolt of goods. They must never suspect that that crimson thread running through the pattern is blood.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

Art is born of humiliation.

Great art can only be created out of love.

No flower of art ever fully blossomed save it was nourished by tears of agony.

Art comes from joy and pain...But mostly from pain.

Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.

There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature.

Real artists take the misery and sadness of life and translate it into art.

When I make a picture, I make love.

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.

In my previous life, I was an artist. I still paint. I love art.

I found I have to stay painting.

I think that there is not really a difference between a 'Peanuts' and a beautiful Renaissance painting. There is something very romantic in the 'Peanuts' - it's at the same level of a novel or a Jane Austen story or a beautiful embroidered rose fabric. It is a piece of romanticism.

I feel that I am much freer if I'm on my own, but I'm sure that there are a lot of painters who would perhaps be even more inventive if they had people round them... I find that if I am on my own I can allow the paint to dictate to me. So the images that I'm putting down on the canvas dictate the thing to me and it gradually builds up and comes along.

I am a great artist and I know it, it is because I am that I have been able to endure so much suffering.

Many are poets, but without the name;For what is Poesy but to createFrom overfeeling Good or Ill; and aimAt an external life beyond our fate,And be the new Prometheus of new men,Bestowing fire from Heaven, and then, too late,Finding the pleasure given repaid with pain

People who paint, including myself, get to a point where a bit of angst comes in. If you're doing it for a living, it's worth it to suffer those slings and arrows.

Musicians have to suffer to a certain degree in order to obtain their outlet.

Picasso says that an artists paints not to ask a question but because he has found something and he wants to share—he cannot help it—what he has found.

Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.

You could say that I have no inspiration, that I only need to paint.

Art is mind and heart and touch as much and more than it is mere instrument, technique - without which however it cannot exist at all.

I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can't write really well about anything else. Why was that old fellow such a marvelous propaganda technician? Because he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.

I only feel, but want the power to paint.