Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
AL ALVAREZHe pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
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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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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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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 the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.
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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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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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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.
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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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Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
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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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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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I’m good at reading people.
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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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