Alberto Giacometti Quotations

If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldnt have to paint at all.

That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.

Only reality interests me now and I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair.

In the past I have never thought about loneliness when working, and I don't think about it now. Yet there must be a reason for the fact that so many people talk about it.

Artistically I am still a child with a whole life ahead of me to discover and create. I want something, but I won't know what it is until I succeed in doing it.

In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession ... That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.

All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces... So it is important to fashion ones work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life.

When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.

It is impossible to do a thing the way I see it because the closer I get the more differently I see.

I paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality... to protect myself.

I've tried doing so, for it was never my intention to paint only with gray. But in the course of my work I have eliminated one color after another, and what has remained is gray, gray, gray!

I don't know if I work in order to do something, or in order to know why I can't do what I want to do.

Once the object has been constructed, I have a tendency to discover in it, transformed and displaced, images, impressions, facts which have deeply moved me.

All I can do will only ever be a faint image of what I see and my success will always be less than my failure or perhaps equal to the failure.

It was always disappointing to see that what I could really master in terms of form boiled down to so little.

The older I grow, the more I find myself alone.

I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.

Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away.

If I see everything in gray, and in gray all the colors which I experience and which I would like to reproduce, then why should I use any other color?

When one lives with problems of importance, the prostitute is ideal. You pay, and whether or not you fail is of no importance. She doesn't care.

Taste for things of the past evolves, doesn't it? What was a masterpiece a hundred years ago is no longer so today.

When I see a head from a great distance, it ceases to be a sphere and becomes an extreme confusion falling down into the abyss.

If the glass there in front of me astounds me more than all the glasses I've seen in painting, and if I even think that the greatest architectural wonder of the world couldn't affect me more than this glass, it's really not worth while going to the Indies to see some temple or other when I have as much and more right in front of me.

Once the object has been constructed, I have a tendency to rediscover in it, transformed and displaced, images, impressions, facts which have deeply moved me (often without my knowing it).

(Art is) the residue of vision.

The head is what matters. The rest of the body plays the part of antennae making life possible for people and life itself is inside the skull.

In a fire, between a Rembrandt and a cat, I would save the cat.

Failure is my best friend. If I succeeded, it would be like dying. Maybe worse.

I see something, find it marvelous, want to try and do it. Whether it fails or whether it comes off in the end becomes secondary. . . . So long as I've learned something about why.

I don't know who I am or who I was. I know it less than ever. I do and I don't identify myself with myself. Everything is totally contradictory, but maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small boy of twelve.

The one thing that fills me with enthusiasm is to try, despite everything, to get nearer to those visions that seem so hard to express.

The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.

At first, one sees the person who is modelling; but little by little, all of the possible sculptures that could be made come between artist and model.

All the art of the past rises up before me, the art of all ages and all civilizations, everything becomes simultaneous, as if space had replaced time. Memories of works of art blend with affective memories, with my work, with my whole life.

If we master a bit of drawing, everything else is possible.

The human face is as strange to me as a countenance, which, the more one looks at it, the more it closes itself off and escapes by the steps of unknown stairways.

What I am looking for is not happiness. I work solely because it is impossible for me to do anything else.

The form is always the measure of the obsession.

When I make my drawings... the path traced by my pencil on the sheet of paper is, to some extent, analogous to the gesture of a man groping his way in the darkness.

In a burning building I would save a cat before a Rembrandt.

The more you fail, the more you succeed. It is only when everything is lost and - instead of giving up - you go on, that you experience the momentary prospect of some slight progress. Suddenly you have the feeling - be it an illusion or not - that something new has opened up.

The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.