When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
AL ALVAREZWhen neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
AL ALVAREZThe real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
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 ALVAREZI absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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 ALVAREZIn [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 ALVAREZThe better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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 ALVAREZHold’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.
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 ALVAREZDespair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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 ALVAREZI mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
AL ALVAREZNo man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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 ALVAREZIt puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
AL ALVAREZ