Great Throughts Treasury

"People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings."

"Picasso is a communist. Neither am I."

"Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation."

"Since I don't smoke, I decided to grow a mustache - it is better for the health."

"So little of what could happen does happen."

"Sometimes I spit on my mother's portrait for pleasure."

"Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision."

"Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic."

"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."

"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."

"The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous."

"The only difference between me and a madman is I'm not mad."

"The only difference between me and the Surrealists is that I am a Surrealist."

"The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret."

"The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture."

"The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents."

"There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction."

"There is more madness to my method than method to my madness."

"There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad."

"There's no greater bliss in life than when the plumber eventually comes to unblock your drains. No writer can give that sort of pleasure."

"This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art."

"Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing."

"Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die."

"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."

"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 Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust."

"What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible"

"What is an elegant woman? An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and who has no hair under her arms."

"What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it."

"When I paint, the ocean [sea] roars. Others merely paddle in their bath."

"When I was five years old I saw an insect that had been eaten by ants and of which nothing remained except the shell. Through the holes in its anatomy one could see the sky. Every time I wish to attain purity I look at the sky through flesh."

"You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life."

"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."