When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
AL ALVAREZTwentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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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 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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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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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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 mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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Divorce transforms habit into drama.
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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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Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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I’m good at reading people.
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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.
AL ALVAREZ