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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.