I find myself lined up with the surrealists because Surrealism means freedom for the creative side of man, for surprise & discovery & life, for an op… - Henry Moore

One knows that later Giacometti broke this domination [[the surrealist influence of Breton, and he became completely interested again in the figure, he became figurative – he did nothing in the end but portraits of his brother and so on, and all very.. ..not realistic, but interested in life, in nature, and not so much in the dream or in the fantasy.

I was in the trenches in the last war [1914 – 1918], & so all the more don’t want to shoot or be shot at, again.. .Although no one can say there’s democracy in England in the real sense of the word, & although British Imperialism has a pretty bloody record, I hate Fascism & Nazism & all its aims & ideology so intensively, that I don’t think I could refuse to help in trying to prevent it from being victorious. However, when the time comes that I’m asked, or have got to do something in this war, I hope it will be something less destructive than taking part in the actual fighting and killing.

And for me Michelangelo's greatest work is one that was in his studio partly finished, partly unfinished when he died 'The Rondanini Pietà'. I don't know of any other single work of art by anyone that is more poignant, more moving. It isn't the most powerful of Michelangelo's works – it's a mixture, in fact, of two styles.. ..the changing became so drastic that I think he knocked the head off the sculpture.. .So the figure must originally have been a good deal taller. And if we see also the proportion of the length of the body of Christ compared with the length of the legs, there's no doubt that the whole top of the original sculpture has been cut away. Now this to me is a great question. Why should I and other sculptors I know, my contemporaries – I think that Giacometti feels this, I know Marino Marini feels it – find this work one of the most moving and greatest works we know of when it's a work which has such disunity in it?.. .But that's so moving, so touching: the position of the heads, the whole tenderness of the top part of the sculpture, is in my opinion more what it is by being in contrast with the rather finished, tough, leathery, typical Michelangelo legs. The top part is Gothic and the lower part is sort of Renaissance.