Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist.
AL ALVAREZI’m good at reading people.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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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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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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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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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
AL ALVAREZ