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.
AL ALVAREZI mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
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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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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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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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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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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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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.
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Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
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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 the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.
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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.
AL ALVAREZ






