What I am looking for is not happiness. I work solely because it is impossible for me to do anything else.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTIWhat I am looking for is not happiness. I work solely because it is impossible for me to do anything else.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTII paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality… to protect myself.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTIAll 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.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTIThat’s the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTIFailure is my best friend. If I succeeded, it would be like dying. Maybe worse.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTII’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!
ALBERTO GIACOMETTITaste for things of the past evolves, doesn’t it? What was a masterpiece a hundred years ago is no longer so today.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTIIn a burning building I would save a cat before a Rembrandt.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTII 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.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTIIt was always disappointing to see that what I could really master in terms of form boiled down to so little.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTIWhen 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.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTIThe form is always the measure of the obsession.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTIThe older I grow, the more I find myself alone.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTIIt is impossible to do a thing the way I see it because the closer I get the more differently I see.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTIThe 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.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTIOnly reality interests me now and I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI