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 ALVAREZThe real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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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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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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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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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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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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Divorce transforms habit into drama.
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Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
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I’m good at reading people.
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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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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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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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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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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
AL ALVAREZ