The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí

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

New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me, and that was young, virgin, and without drama, that of America. I traveled in America, but instead of romantically and directly rubbing the snakeskin of my body against the asperities of its terrain, I preferred to peel protected within the armor of the gleaming black crustacean of a Cadillac which I gave Gala as a present. Nevertheless all the men who admire and the women who are in love with my old skin will easily be able to find its remnants in shredded pieces of various sizes scattered to the winds along the roads from New York via Pittsburgh to California. I have peeled with every wind; pieces of my skin have remained caught here and there along my way, scattered through that "promised land" which is America; certain pieces of this skin have remained hanging in the spiny vegetation of the Arizona desert, along the trails where I galloped on horseback, where I got rid of all my former Aristotelian "planetary notions." Other pieces of my skin have remained spread out like tablecloths without food on the summits of the rocky masses by which one reaches the Salt Lake, in which the hard passion of the Mormons saluted in me the European phantom of Apollinaire. Still other pieces have remained suspended along the "antediluvian" bridge of San Francisco, where I saw in passing the ten thousand most beautiful virgins in America, completely naked, standing in line on each side of me as I passed, like two rows of organ-pipes of angelic flesh with cowrie-shell sea vulvas.

My mother's death supervened, and this was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her... I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul.

An unpredictable, faithful and objective hazard seems to have systematically singled out my life to make what are normally uneventful incidents violent, phenomenal and memorable.

I still had to invent and write a great philosophic work, which I had begun a year before, and which was called, “The Tower of Babel.” I had already written five hundred pages of it, and I was still only on the Prologue! At this period my sexual anxiety disappeared almost completely, and the philosophic theories of my book took up all the room in my psychic activity.

Netikiu, kad autobusų vairuotojai neturi vaizduotė ir kad kartais netrokšta važiuodami prošal išdaužti „Prisunic“ vitriną ir paskubomis pagriebti keletą dovanų savo šeimoms. Nesuprantu, kodėl tualeto bakelių gamintojai neįtaiso į šiuos aparatus bombų, kurios sprogtų patraukus už grandinėlės. Nesuvokiu, kodėl visų vonių forma vienoda, kodėl nesugalvojama brangesnių taksi su viduje įtaisytų dirbtiniu lietumi, kad keleivis turėtų apsivilkti lietpaltį, kai lauke giedra. Kodėl, kai užsakau keptą omarą, man neatneša virto telefono, kodėl ledo kibirėliuose vėsinamas šampanas, o ne telefono rageliai, visuomet šilti ir lipnūs.. Ir kodėl nėra mėtų žalumo omaro formos telefonų sabalinėje įmautėje, skirtų fatališkoms moterims, o su nudvėsusia žiurke viduje - Edgarui Poe, kodėl jie ne su pasaitėliu, kodėl nepritvirtinti prie gyvo vėžlio nugaros... Stulbina žmonių, visuomet darančių tą patį, aklumas. Stulbina ir tai, kad banko tarnautojas nesuvalgo čekio. Man keista, kodėl dailininkams iki šiol netoptelėjo mintis tapyti „minkštų laikrodžių“...

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. Ever since, my ambition has been continually on the increase, as has my megalomania: now all I want to be is Salvador Dalí.

But my own influence has always outdistanced me to such a point that it has been impossible for me to convince anyone that this influence came from me.