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.
AL ALVAREZDespite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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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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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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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 absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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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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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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When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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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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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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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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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I’m good at reading people.
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