Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.
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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Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
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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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No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
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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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Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
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When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
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Divorce transforms habit into drama.
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I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
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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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When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
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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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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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I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
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I’m good at reading people.
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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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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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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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The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
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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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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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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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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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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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