Alberto Giacometti Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

The form is always the measure of the obsession.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

(Art is) the residue of vision.

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

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).

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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

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.