"Until the end of the fascist era and of the war , I continued to hark back to the sober realism of the artists of the Etruscan funerary figures, or the sculptors of some Roman portraits, especially the earlier ones. My own way of reacting against the imperialist pathos of official Fascist art continued, until 1944, to consist in identifying my art very consciously with my private life, so that I never allowed myself any form of expression that might seem too blatantly public."

“My equestrian statues express the torment caused by the events of this century. the restlessness of my horse increases with each new work, the rider is always more exhausted, he has lost his domination of the beast and the catastrophes to which he succumbs resemble those that destroyed sodom and pompeii. I aspire to make visible the last stage of destruction of a myth, of the myth of heroic and victorious individualism, the humanists' man of virtue. my work in the last years doesn't want to be heroic, but tragic.”

“I had been born in an Earthly Paradise from which we all have expelled. Not so long ago a sculptor could still be content with a search for full, sensual and vigorous forms. But in the past fifteen years , nearly all our new sculpture has tended to create forms that are disintegrating.”

“There is an intimate relationship between my pictorial and my sculptural work. I would never begin on a sculpture without first gaining an idea of the colour.. .My mind is captivated by this task until I start to put down the colour on paper and imagine that this colour will become a drawing. And then, suddenly, the drawing begins to acquire shape, the shape, and this shape becomes the real shape.”

“I am no longer seeking, in my own equestrian figures, to celebrate the triumph of any victorious hero. On the contrary, I seek to commemorate in them something tragic – in fact, a kind of 'Twilight of Man', a defeat rather than a victory. If you look back on all my equestrian figures of the past twelve years you will notice that the rider is each time less in control of his mount, and that the latter is each time more wild in its terror, but frozen stiff, rather than reared or running away. All this is because I feel that we are on the eve of the end of a whole world.”

“My 'Pomone' live in a bright world, with their sunny disposition, full of humanity, of abundance, and of great sensuality. they represent a happy season that breaks the tragic time of war. in all these images, femininity is enriched with all its past meanings, those most inherent, most mysterious: a sort of unavoidable necessity, of unmovable stillness, of primitive and unconscious fertility. The figure, the statue, instead demands a wider research of shapes, of lines, of bodies. My women, that some find awkward, respond to this preoccupation. In the figure, I propose to myself to deepen the way I play with volume in a togetherness that is always more united, more steady, yet also free and nimble. But this research on volume is not the only premise of the sculptor, who need not ever forget what moves most in a sculpture is always its inspiration.”

“But I am no longer trying to formulate a stylised version of anxiety such as we find in the Laocoon group and in so many other sculptures of the Silver Age of antiquity. I feel that these works are always a bit too melodramatic. If you really want to find the sources of my present style in antiquity, I must confess that you will find them in the remains of the life of the past rather than in those of its art. The fossilized corpses that have been unearthed in Pompeii.. ..if the whole earth is destroyed in our atomic age, I feel that the human forms which may survive as mere fossils will have become sculptures similar to mine.”