When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
AL ALVAREZThe better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
-
-
Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ -
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 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 -
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 ALVAREZ -
When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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 -
Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist.
AL ALVAREZ -
It is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it’s funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.
AL ALVAREZ -
Divorce transforms habit into drama.
AL ALVAREZ -
No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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 -
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.
AL ALVAREZ -
It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
AL ALVAREZ -
The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
AL ALVAREZ