You 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 ALVAREZIt is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it’s funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
-
-
When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
AL ALVAREZ -
No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ -
The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
AL ALVAREZ -
It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
AL ALVAREZ -
The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
AL ALVAREZ -
Divorce transforms habit into drama.
AL ALVAREZ -
Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
AL ALVAREZ -
I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
AL ALVAREZ -
I’m good at reading people.
AL ALVAREZ -
He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ -
I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
AL ALVAREZ -
Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
AL ALVAREZ -
Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
AL ALVAREZ






