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.
AL ALVAREZSince 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.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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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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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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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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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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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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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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It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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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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