I’m good at reading people.
AL ALVAREZDespite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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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The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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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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I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
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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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The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
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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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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.
AL ALVAREZ