Twentieth-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.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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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The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
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Divorce transforms habit into drama.
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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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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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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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It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
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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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I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
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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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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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Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
AL ALVAREZ