Alberto Giacometti quotes

Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor and painter, famous for his distinctive elongated human figures. His work explored themes of existentialism and the human condition, influencing modern art deeply. He is recognized as one of the most important sculptors of the twentieth century. Here are 23 of his quotes:

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

Alberto Giacometti

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alberto Giacometti

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

Alberto Giacometti

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

Alberto Giacometti

Once the object has been constructed, I have a tendency to rediscover in it, transformed and displaced, images, impressions, facts which have deeply moved me (often without my knowing it).

Alberto Giacometti

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

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

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

Alberto Giacometti

There was a third element in reality that concerned me: movement. Despite all my efforts, it was impossible for me then to endure a sculpture that gave an illusion of movement, a leg advancing, a raised arm, a head looking sideways. I could only create such movement if it was real and actual. I also wanted to give the sensation of motion that could be induced.

Alberto Giacometti

A little after I started to do sculpture, I painted some of them, and then I destroyed them all. I've begun again several times. In 1951, I painted a whole series of sculptures. But in painting them, you see what the form lacks. And it's useless to paint over something that you don't believe in. I tried again a month ago. In painting them, the deficiencies of form came through.

Alberto Giacometti

One starts by seeing the person who poses, but little by little all the possible sculptures of him intervene... The more real a real vision of him disappears, the stranger his head becomes.

Alberto Giacometti

And then the wish to make compositions with figures. For this I had to make (quickly I thought; in passing), one or two studies from nature, just enough to understand the construction of a head, of a whole figure, and in 1935 I took a model. This study should take, I thought, two weeks and then I could realize my compositions...I worked with the model all day from 1935 to 1940...Nothing was as I imagined. A head, became for me an object completely unknown and without dimensions.

Alberto Giacometti

Figures were never for me a compact mass but like a transparent construction.

Alberto Giacometti

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

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