The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
AL ALVAREZMass 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.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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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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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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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Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
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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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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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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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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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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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Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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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.
AL ALVAREZ






