I paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality... to protect myself.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.