«I find it very difficult to say. I think that because my temperament and my nature are inclined to contemplation, they led me to these results. I can't say anything else, it is very difficult for an artist to give reasons. Expressing what is in nature and in the visible world is what interests me most [...] I believe that the educational duty of the figurative arts, particularly today, is to communicate the images and feelings that the visible world awakens in us. I think that what we see is the creation and the invention of the artist, and whether he is able to capture those diaphragms. The diaphragms are the conventional images that stand between him and those things. Galileo remembered that the truth, the book of philosophy, the book of nature, is written in characters which are foreign to our alphabet. These characters are triangles, squares, circles, spheres, pyramids, cones and other geometrical figures. I feel the Galilean thought alive inside my own aged conviction. Feelings and images are awakened by the visible world, which is the formal world, and are very difficult to express, even impossible to express using words. These are in fact feelings that have no relationship, or at least have a very indirect one, with affections and daily interests, because they are determined precisely by the shapes, the colours, the space, and the light. However, I am far from trying to establish standards for the work of artists or to try to define a poetics»
From The Voice of America, interview at Giorgio Morandi, 25th of April 1957.