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.
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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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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Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
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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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I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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I’m good at reading people.
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It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
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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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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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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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The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
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Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
AL ALVAREZ