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.
AL ALVAREZYou 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.
AL ALVAREZThe point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
AL ALVAREZI mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
AL ALVAREZIt puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
AL ALVAREZDivorce transforms habit into drama.
AL ALVAREZI’m good at reading people.
AL ALVAREZSeemed 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.
AL ALVAREZNow, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
AL ALVAREZThe better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
AL ALVAREZNo man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
AL ALVAREZTwentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
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.
AL ALVAREZI absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
AL ALVAREZDespair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
AL ALVAREZIt is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it’s funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.
AL ALVAREZIn the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.
AL ALVAREZ