Salvador Dali Quotes

Not all paintings are abstract; they're not all Jackson Pollock. There's value in a photograph of a man alone on a boat at sea, and there is value in painting of a man alone on a boat at sea. In the painting, the painting has more freedom to express an idea, more latitude in being able to elicit certain emotion.

Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Images have a unique power to impart that which is beyond words.

I came down successfully through Picasso and Braque, down through Pollock, I guess, but I began to stop at Franz Kline and the Abstractionists. I like their design, brilliant design, marvelous color layers. But I don't find any human content there. I'm from an old school, and painting has to have human content for me.

It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws.

He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.

It became clear to me that I had to push it toward a more representational way of drawing.

I feel like I can communicate much better using images than words.

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.

When I work on a book, I usually start with a question. And I don't sit around and go 'I need to write a book. What's a good question?' It will be a question that's just clanging around in my head. So for 'What It Is,' it was this idea of 'What is an image?'

Wherever there are words, let there be pictures.

I wanted to communicate what I had seen, so that others could see it.

I don't want to imitate life in movies; I want to represent it. And in that representation, you use the colors you feel, and sometimes they are fake colors. But always it's to show one emotion.

If I paint something, I don't want to have to explain what it is.

I can use movie as a language. Not only could it send a good message, I could let people know about my thinking and how I see the world, how I see the colour, how I see the music, how I see everything.

A picture is a fact.

I love many realists but very strongly resist the notion that realism presents a less stylized, more authentic version of the world.

I'm huge on visuals. I love visuals.

If I had gone to art college and everybody was being a conceptual artist, I probably would have wanted to be a portrait or landscape painter.

French photography was basically poetic, and mine was vulgar and brash and violent, except that there's never any violence in the photographs: it's only in the photographic style.

I was trying. I was crawling. I was coming into myself. I was trying to in some ways get beyond - what is the word that I'm looking for? - metaphorical language in painting, and to create something that was more indexical. And what I mean by that is that when you go to the library there's an index card that refers to a book that's actual and real in the world. So that index relates to something real.

I look at my body as an extension of the music. My body is a canvas, and with my tattoos, I want them to be a direct reflection of my thoughts.

My approach to portraiture is conceptual.