Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist.
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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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 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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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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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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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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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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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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When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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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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Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
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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’m good at reading people.
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The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
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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.
AL ALVAREZ