It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
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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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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Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
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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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Divorce transforms habit into drama.
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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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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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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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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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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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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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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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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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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.
AL ALVAREZ