Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist.
AL ALVAREZI absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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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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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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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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It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
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I’m good at reading people.
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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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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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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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Hold’em is a game of calculated aggression. If your cards are good enough for you to call a bet, they are good enough to raise with.
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To 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.
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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
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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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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 ALVAREZ