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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldn’t have to paint at all.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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!

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

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