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
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.
reading people
I'm good at reading people.
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.
art imagination police
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.
nervous poet british
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.
When you make a bet, you're saying something.
mean patient
I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don't get any patients.
insulting insult easy
It is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it's funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.
men
No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
couple curious later matter miss pages perfect quite repeated sentence work
Because one of the curious things about writing is that it doesn't matter how perfect you try and get it, that you never quite get the sentence right, or there are things that you miss and, you know, you have work repeated a couple of pages later that shouldn't have been repeated.
english-poet ways
I could think of worse ways of going than at the poker table.
english-poet players
The fact that we write about it doesn't mean we play better than ordinary players at all.
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.
men water despair
Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.