Alberto Giacometti Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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