Alberto Giacometti Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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. — Alberto Giacometti

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

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? — Alberto Giacometti

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. — Alberto Giacometti

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

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

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

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. — 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. — Alberto Giacometti

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

The older I grow, the more I find myself alone. — Alberto Giacometti

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! — Alberto Giacometti

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. — Alberto Giacometti

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. — Alberto Giacometti

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. — Alberto Giacometti

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. — Alberto Giacometti

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

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. — Alberto Giacometti

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. — Alberto Giacometti

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

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

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. — Alberto Giacometti

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. — Alberto Giacometti

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

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. — Alberto Giacometti

(Art is) the residue of vision. — Alberto Giacometti

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. — Alberto Giacometti

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. — Alberto Giacometti

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

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

The form is always the measure of the obsession. — Alberto Giacometti

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. — Alberto Giacometti

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. — Alberto Giacometti

In a burning building I would save a cat before a Rembrandt. — Alberto Giacometti

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

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. — Alberto Giacometti

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. — Alberto Giacometti

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. — Alberto Giacometti

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. — Alberto Giacometti