It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
AL ALVAREZHe pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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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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The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
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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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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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When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
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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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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.
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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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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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