In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets’ nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.
AL ALVAREZTwentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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Since what happened in them was beyond the imagination, it was therefore also beyond art and all those human values on which art is traditionally based.
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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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Seemed merely a temporary halt on my steady descent through layer after layer of depression, like an elevator stopping for a moment on the way down to the basement.
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In the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.
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You pause and attend: the heart beats in your chest; outside, the trees are thick with new leaves, a swallow dips over them, the light moves, people are going about their business.
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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights.
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The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
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It is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it’s funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.
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Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist.
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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
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I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
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Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
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