It is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it’s funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.
AL ALVAREZin 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.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.
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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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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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I’m good at reading people.
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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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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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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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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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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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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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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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When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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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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