The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
AL ALVAREZWhen neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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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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I’m good at reading people.
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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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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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Divorce transforms habit into drama.
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Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
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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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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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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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Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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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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I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
AL ALVAREZ