I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
AL ALVAREZI absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
AL ALVAREZIt puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
AL ALVAREZMass 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 ALVAREZNow, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
AL ALVAREZI’m good at reading people.
AL ALVAREZIn 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 ALVAREZHe pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.
AL ALVAREZThe point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
AL ALVAREZSeemed 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.
AL ALVAREZTo 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 ALVAREZin 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 ALVAREZDespite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist.
AL ALVAREZYou 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.
AL ALVAREZTwentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
AL ALVAREZNo man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
AL ALVAREZIt is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it’s funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.
AL ALVAREZ