Quotes from Alberto Giacometti

If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldn't have to paint at all.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I don't want to be a prisoner of comfort.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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!

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.

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