Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Al Alvarez, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Al Alvarez quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 27 Al Alvarez quotes for you to read and share.
It is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it's funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money. -- Al Alvarez
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
The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money. -- Al Alvarez
But in a tournament, you can be said in for all your money at any point so you can't make any mistakes so you have to, it's all about where you're sitting at the table. -- Al Alvarez
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
Suicide is a confession of failure. And like divorce, it is shrouded in excuses and rationalizations spun endlessly to disguise the simple fact that all one's energy, passion, appetite and ambition have been aborted. -- Al Alvarez
I absolutely don't believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck. -- 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
I mean to say, this is the book and I really loathe it and I can't imagine what a nice Jewish boy like me ever, how I ever got into this dreadful trade. -- Al Alvarez
The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be. -- Al Alvarez
I'm good at reading people. -- Al Alvarez
For the artist himself art is not necessarily therapeutic; he is not automatically relieved of his fantasies by expressing them. Instead, by some perverse logic of creation, the act of formal expressions may simply make the dredged-up material more readily available to him. -- Al Alvarez
I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death. - W. B. YEATS -- Al Alvarez
From that altitude, the world looked calm and vivid and possible. But by the time we landed at Prestwick the clouds were down like the black cap on a hanging judge. -- Al Alvarez
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
I could think of worse ways of going than at the poker table. -- Al Alvarez
Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level. -- Al Alvarez
I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don't get any patients. -- Al Alvarez
Yes, I think poker really isn't gambling. -- Al Alvarez
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
When you make a bet, you're saying something. -- Al Alvarez
The pity is not that there is a myth of Sylvia Plath but that the myth is not simply that of an enormously gifted poet whose death came carelessly, by mistake, and too soon. -- Al Alvarez
The fact that we write about it doesn't mean we play better than ordinary players at all. -- 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; 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
No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life. -- Al Alvarez
Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it's a kind of risky trade. -- Al Alvarez
I think one of the interesting things about poker is that once you let your ego in, you're done for. -- Al Alvarez