The quote ends Peter Novick's book -- That Noble Dream -- a history of the notion of objectivity in the American Historical Profession and is originally from Sartre's Between Existentialism and Marxism.
"In the domain of expression success is necessarily failure. It is impossible to succeed, since at the outset you set yourself the goal of failure (to capture movement in immobile objects, for instance).
The moment comes when you just can't take the work any further ... At this point, my friend Giacometti explains, you can throw your piece of sculpture in the rubbish bin or exhibit it in a gallery. So there it is. You never quite grasp what you set out to achieve. And then suddenly it's a statue or a book. The opposite of what you wanted. If its faults are inscribed methodically in the negative which you present to the public, they at least point to what it might have been. And the spectator becomes the real sculptor, fashioning his model in thin air or reading the book between the lines."
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