Al Alvarez famous quotes

07-06-2025

When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself. 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 Alvarez

#Suicide #Moving #Heart
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. He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul - his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.
-- Al Alvarez

#Self #Media #Psychics
Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist; 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

#Art #Imagination #Police
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 Alvarez

#Nervous #Poet #Preference
When you make a bet, you're saying something.
-- Al Alvarez
I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don't get any patients.
-- Al Alvarez

#Mean #Patient
I'm good at reading people.
-- Al Alvarez

#Reading #People
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

#Gambling #Games #Cards
Divorce transforms habit into drama.
-- Al Alvarez

#Drama #Divorce #Habit
The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
-- Al Alvarez

#Gambling #Games #Looks
The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
-- Al Alvarez

#Art #Artist #Vulnerable
Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in 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

#Art #May #Coherence
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. It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life. Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.
-- Al Alvarez

#Mistake #Climbing #Routine
I absolutely don't believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
-- Al Alvarez

#Believe #Luck
Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it's a kind of risky trade.
-- Al Alvarez

#Writing #Thinking #Kind
Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation, 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

#Depression #Disappointment #Relaxation
The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, 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.
-- Al Alvarez

#Art #Real #Nerves

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