Divorce transforms habit into drama.
AL ALVAREZThe better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
-
-
Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
AL ALVAREZ -
Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
AL ALVAREZ -
I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
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 -
The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
AL ALVAREZ -
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 ALVAREZ -
Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ -
The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
AL ALVAREZ -
I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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 -
No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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