Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
AL ALVAREZTwentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
AL ALVAREZThe point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
AL ALVAREZThe better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
AL ALVAREZIn [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 ALVAREZDivorce transforms habit into drama.
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 ALVAREZEach sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
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 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 ALVAREZI mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
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 ALVAREZThe real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
AL ALVAREZDespair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
AL ALVAREZPerhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
AL ALVAREZWhen neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
AL ALVAREZHold’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.
AL ALVAREZ