Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist.
AL ALVAREZ
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.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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.
AL ALVAREZ -
Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
AL ALVAREZ -
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 ALVAREZ -
Divorce transforms habit into drama.
AL ALVAREZ -
Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
AL ALVAREZ -
When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ -
It is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it’s funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.
AL ALVAREZ -
I’m good at reading people.
AL ALVAREZ -
The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
AL ALVAREZ -
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 ALVAREZ -
Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ -
I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ