It is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it’s funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.
AL ALVAREZNow, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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Divorce transforms habit into drama.
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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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It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
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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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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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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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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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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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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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Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
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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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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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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.
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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
AL ALVAREZ