The feelings and images aroused by the visible world are very difficult to express or are perhaps inexpressible with words because they are determine… - Giorgio Morandi

I suppose I remain.. ..a believer in Art for Art's sake rather than in Art for the sake of religion, of social justice or of national glory. Nothing is more alien to me than an art which sets out to serve other purposes than those implied in the work of art in itself..

..my own paintings of that period (1916 – 1919) remain pure still-life compositions and never suggest any metaphysical, surrealist, psychological, or literary considerations at all [reacting on similarities with the art of Carrà, and de Chirico, suggested by the interviewer]. My milliners' dummies, for instance, are objects like others and have not been selected to suggest symbolic representations of human beings of legendary or mythological characters. The only titles that I chose for these paintings were conventional, like 'Still Life, Flowers or Landscape', without any implications of strangeness of an unreal world [as in Surrealism or in 'Pittura Metafisica' of De Chirico].

Among the ancient painters, the Tuscan's are the ones that interest me more: above all Giotto and Massacio [in early Renaissance]. Of the modern painters I think that Corot, Courbet, Fattori, and Cezanne are the most legitimate heirs to the glorious Italian tradition.