Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
AL ALVAREZNo man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.
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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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It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
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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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He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.
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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 absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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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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When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
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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.
AL ALVAREZ






