Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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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’m good at reading people.
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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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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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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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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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It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
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Divorce transforms habit into drama.
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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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The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
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Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
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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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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
AL ALVAREZ