He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.
AL ALVAREZIt is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it’s funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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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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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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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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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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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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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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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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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Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
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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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It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
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The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
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