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.
AL ALVAREZWhen you make a bet, you’re saying something.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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I’m good at reading people.
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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.
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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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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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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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I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
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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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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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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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It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
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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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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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When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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