Al Alvarez
Al Alvarez
Alfred Alvarezis an English poet, novelist, essayist and critic who publishes under the name A. Alvarez and Al Alvarez...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth5 August 1929
Al Alvarez quotes about
suicide moving heart
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.
drama divorce habit
Divorce transforms habit into drama.
games gambling casinos
The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
art artist vulnerable
The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
art may coherence
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.
mistake climbing routine-life
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.
believe luck dont-believe
I absolutely don't believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
writing thinking kind
Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it's a kind of risky trade.
depression disappointment relaxation
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.
games gambling cards
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.
reading people
I'm good at reading people.
men water despair
Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
art real nerves
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.
self media psychics
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.