Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
AL ALVAREZIt puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
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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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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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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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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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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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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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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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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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