It is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it’s funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.
AL ALVAREZNo man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
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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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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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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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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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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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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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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