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 ALVAREZI mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
More Al Alvarez Quotes
-
-
It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ -
When you make a bet, you’re saying something.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ -
The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
AL ALVAREZ -
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 ALVAREZ -
I’m good at reading people.
AL ALVAREZ -
Divorce transforms habit into drama.
AL ALVAREZ -
I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
AL ALVAREZ -
Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
AL ALVAREZ -
Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist.
AL ALVAREZ -
When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.
AL ALVAREZ -
Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.
AL ALVAREZ -
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.
AL ALVAREZ






