Poor workers! First they're cuckolded, and, as if that weren't enough, then they're beaten! Work's a curse, Saturno. I say to hell with the work you have to do to earn a living! That kind of work does us no honour; all it does is fill up the bellies of the pigs who exploit us. But the work you do because you like to do it, because you've heard the call, you've got a vocation - that's ennobling! We should all be able to work like that. Look at me, Saturno - I don't work. And I don't care if they hang me, I won't work! Yet I'm alive! I may live badly, but at least I don't have to work to do it!
All my life I've been harassed by questions: Why is something this way and not another? How do you account for that? This rage to understand, to fill in the blanks, only makes life more banal. If we could only find the courage to leave our destiny to chance, to accept the fundamental mystery of our lives, then we might be closer to the sort of happiness that comes with innocence.
You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.
The bar… is an exercise in solitude. Above all else, it must be quiet, dark, very comfortable - and, contrary to modern mores, no music of any kind, no matter how faint. In sum, there should be no more than a dozen tables, and a clientele that doesn't like to talk.
Salvador Dali seduced many ladies, particularly American ladies, but these seductions usually consisted of stripping them naked in his apartment, frying a couple of eggs, putting them on the woman's shoulders and, without a word, showing them the door.
"Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether."
"If you were to ask me if I'd ever had the bad luck to miss my daily cocktail, I'd have to say that I doubt it; where certain things are concerned, I plan ahead."
"If someone were to prove to me right this minute that God, in all his luminousness, exists, it wouldn't change a single aspect of my behaviour."
"In the name of Hypocrites, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival."
Frankly, despite my horror of the press, I'd love to rise from the grave every ten years or so and go buy a few newspapers.
God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.
Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.
Tobacco and alcohol, delicious fathers of abiding friendships and fertile reveries.
I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life.
A paranoiac. . . like a poet, is born, not made.
Thank God I'm an atheist.
