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 ALVAREZIt puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
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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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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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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When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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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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You pause and attend: the heart beats in your chest; outside, the trees are thick with new leaves, a swallow dips over them, the light moves, people are going about their business.
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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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I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
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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.
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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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The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
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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.
AL ALVAREZ