Salvador Dali's real quotes are the ones with a book, a newspaper or a date behind them: the madman line, first reported in 1934, the cook and Napoleon opening of The Secret Life of Salvador Dali in 1942, and a remark on imitation from Dali by Dali in 1970. Several of the lines most often printed under his name, the one about the bird with wings among them, have no such source.
He wrote an autobiography and a diary and talked to reporters for decades, so a real quote can usually be matched to a page or a newspaper column. Most of the fakes cannot.
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The most famous of the real ones was first printed in translation. In December 1934, Dali was in Hartford, Connecticut, and the Springfield Daily News, from Springfield, Massachusetts, quoted him as remarking, calmly, that the only difference between him and a madman was that he was not a madman. The paper noted that he spoke what it called "Catalan French" and printed his words in English.
So the line that built his public character reaches us through a reporter's ear, and it makes a fair test for everything else attributed to him. A real quote has a book, a newspaper or a lecture behind it, and a date. Many of the lines on posters have none of the three.
One of them has an ancestor printed in a business magazine in 1908, when Dali was four years old. Its trail runs through a graduation speech, a book of quotations and a Florida newspaper before it lands on his name.
Where did Dali's madman line begin?
In Hartford, Connecticut, in December 1934…
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