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 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
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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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It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
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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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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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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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It is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it’s funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.
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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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I’m good at reading people.
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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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I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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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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Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
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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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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.
AL ALVAREZ