It is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it’s funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.
AL ALVAREZI’m good at reading people.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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Divorce transforms habit into drama.
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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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When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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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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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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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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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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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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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The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
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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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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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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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