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.
AL ALVAREZWhen neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
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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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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
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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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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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When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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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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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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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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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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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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Divorce transforms habit into drama.
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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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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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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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