Giacometti quotes

 Life is only an abyss.

I no longer understand anything about life, about death, about anything.

Art is only a way of seeing. Whatever I may look at, everything is beyond me, everything surprises me. I don’t exactly know what I am seeing. It’s too complex.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Basically, I no longer work for anything but the sensation I have while working.

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

— Giacometti