I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
AL ALVAREZI absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
AL ALVAREZWhen you make a bet, you’re saying something.
AL ALVAREZTwentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
AL ALVAREZSince 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.
AL ALVAREZNow, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
AL ALVAREZHe pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.
AL ALVAREZDespite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist.
AL ALVAREZIn the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.
AL ALVAREZI’m good at reading people.
AL ALVAREZDespair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
AL ALVAREZNo man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
AL ALVAREZI mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
AL ALVAREZThe better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
AL ALVAREZEach sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
AL ALVAREZTo put yourself into a situation where a mistake cannot necessarily be recouped, where the life you lose may be your own, clears the head wonderfully.
AL ALVAREZMass 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.
AL ALVAREZ