Alberto Giacometti Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

The form is always the measure of the obsession.

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 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?

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.

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.

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

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.

(Art is) the residue of vision.

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

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.