Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Al Alvarez
Age: 90 †
Born: 1929
Born: August 5
Died: 2019
Died: September 23
Author
Autobiographer
Literary Critic
Poet
Writer
London
England
Alfred Alvarez
Real
Audience
Absurd
Life
Society
Resistance
Inescapably
Force
Forces
Imaginatively
Death
Recognize
Unjustified
Facts
Created
Gratuitous
Art
Accept
Nerve
Ends
Accepting
Random
Part
Violence
Nerves

More quotes by Al Alvarez

Image
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
Image
I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don't get any patients.
Al Alvarez
Image
Divorce transforms habit into drama.
Al Alvarez
Image
When you make a bet, you're saying something.
Al Alvarez
Image
I absolutely don't believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
Al Alvarez
Image
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
Image
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
Image
No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
Al Alvarez
Image
I'm good at reading people.
Al Alvarez
Image
The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.
Al Alvarez
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.
Al Alvarez
Image
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
Image
Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it's a kind of risky trade.
Al Alvarez
Image
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
Image
The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.
Al Alvarez