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 absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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.
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I’m good at reading people.
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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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I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
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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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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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When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
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When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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To put yourself into a situation where a mistake cannot necessarily be recouped, where the life you lose may be your own, clears the head wonderfully.
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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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Divorce transforms habit into drama.
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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
AL ALVAREZ