Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
AL ALVAREZTo 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.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
-
-
I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
AL ALVAREZ -
I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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 -
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.
AL ALVAREZ -
When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
AL ALVAREZ -
Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
AL ALVAREZ -
The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
AL ALVAREZ -
Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
AL ALVAREZ -
The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ -
Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
AL ALVAREZ -
No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
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 -
When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
AL ALVAREZ






