Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
AL ALVAREZHold’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.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
-
-
Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
AL ALVAREZ -
The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
AL ALVAREZ -
I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
AL ALVAREZ -
Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
AL ALVAREZ -
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 ALVAREZ -
The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ -
When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
AL ALVAREZ -
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 -
Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
AL ALVAREZ -
Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist.
AL ALVAREZ -
No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ -
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 -
The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
AL ALVAREZ