The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
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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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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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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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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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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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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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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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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The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
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When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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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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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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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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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.
AL ALVAREZ