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 ALVAREZNo man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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 point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
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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’m good at reading people.
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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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Hold’em is a game of calculated aggression. If your cards are good enough for you to call a bet, they are good enough to raise with.
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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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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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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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 absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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Divorce transforms habit into drama.
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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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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