Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
AL ALVAREZPerhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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Divorce transforms habit into drama.
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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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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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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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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.
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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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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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When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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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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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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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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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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