Sublime

The last canvas I saw him working on in Port Lligat was a painting of a decaying donkey, a scene lifted from Un Chien Andalou, the surrealist film he had made with Luis Buñuel in 1929. Every obsession returned. 'I am the concentric eccentric,' he said and I thought of ripples growing smaller as they vanish to nothing. He was shrinking, shrivelling,

There was Captain Peter Moore, a small man, Dalí's business manager, on the end of a lead being led by an ocelot

And I remember you telling us how you first met the plastics millionaire, your most famous collector, a man with his very own Dalí museum in St Petersburg, Florida. It was at the St Regis Hotel in New York in the 1950s, the innocent years. In the pee-pee room, naturally. They stood side by side in the row of polished white urinals. 'What was he doi

Dalí was a hook and the world was his aquarium. He had a power that was incalculable, intangible, illogical, subtle and terrifying. He was, more than anyone ever understood, a tutor, the master of twentieth century desire and reasoning. His philosophy found life a cruel and heartless joke; a sombre and extravagant passage from nothing into nothing.

he had the unmistakable facial morphology of a genius.1 He gave signs of alarming precocity, but his glance was veiled by the melancholy characterizing insurmountable intelligence. I, on the other hand, was much less intelligent, but I reflected everything. I was to become the prototype par excellence of the phenomenally retarded “polymorphous perv

Gala's predator eyes surveyed the scene like a hungry person looking at a menu. Like Don Salvador, she liked skinny, handsome young beaux with slim waists and broad chests and liked them more if they could play the piano. Gala seemed strangely normal among the exotics in a plain suit and her hair in the black bow Coco Chanel had given her. I never