Alberto Giacometti Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

(Art is) the residue of vision.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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