It is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it’s funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.
AL ALVAREZI absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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.
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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.
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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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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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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.
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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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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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.
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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
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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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He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.
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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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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
AL ALVAREZ