The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
AL ALVAREZIn the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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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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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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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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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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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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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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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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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Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
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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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Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
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Divorce transforms habit into drama.
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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.
AL ALVAREZ






