In the period from 1908 to the early months of 1914 1 saw him almost every day and he confided to me his tastes, his plans, his enthusiasms and his dislikes, his sorrows and his joys.

From the day we first met I was struck by his outstanding artistic gifts, and I begged him not to destroy his notebooks and sketches. I put at his disposal the modest resources I had, and so I own almost all the paintings and drawings of this period. They make it possible to follow his development during these decisive years step by step and stroke by stroke. It is unusual to have kept together, rather like the stages of an engraving, the successive stages of the very lively thinking of an artist searching for his own style-which, moreover, was very quickly revealed.

From: Enzo Maiolino (ed.), Modigliani vivo, p. 34


[Modigliani] thought of himself more as a sculptor and graphic artist than a painter and believed that each piece of sculpture should be unique, a single example worked directly and exclusively in stone.

Quoted by Osvaldo Patani in: Modigliani a Montparnasse 1909-1920,p.16