Al Alvarez Quotes & Sayings

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

The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be. — 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

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

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

I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don't get any patients. — 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

The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money. — Al Alvarez

When you make a bet, you're saying something. — 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

Foolish man, what do you bemoan, and what do you fear? Wherever you look there is an end of evils. You see that yawning precipice? It leads to liberty. You see that flood, that river, that well? Liberty houses within them. You see that stunted, parched, and sorry tree? From each branch liberty hangs. Your neck, your throat, your heart are all so many ways of escape from slavery [...] Do you enquire the road to freedom? You shall find it in every vein of your body. — 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

Yes, I think poker really isn't gambling. — Al Alvarez

[Sylvia Plath] was now far along a peculiarly solitary road on which not many would risk following her. So it was important for her to know that her messages were coming back clear and strong. Yet not even her determinedly bright self-reliance could disguise the loneliness that came from her almost palpably, like a heat haze. She asked for neither sympathy nor help but, like bereaved widow at a wake, she simply wanted company in her mourning. — Al Alvarez

I could think of worse ways of going than at the poker table. — 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 absolutely don't believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck. — Al Alvarez

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. — Al Alvarez

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

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

Suicide may be a declaration of bankruptcy which passes judgement on a life as one long history of failures. But it is a history which also amounts at least to this one decision which, by its very finality, is not wholly a failure. Some kind of minimal freedom - the freedom to die in one's own way and in one's own time - has been salvaged from the wreck of all those unwanted necessities. — Al Alvarez

Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level. — 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

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

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

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

Suicide creates his own society: to shut yourself off from other people in some dingy, rented box and stare, like Melville's Bartleby, day in and day out at the dead wall outside your window is in itself a rejection of the world which is said to be rejecting you. It is a way of saying, like Bartleby, 'I prefer not to' to every offer and every possibility, which is a condition no amount of social engineering will cure. — 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

I'm good at reading people. — 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

I think one of the interesting things about poker is that once you let your ego in, you're done for. — Al Alvarez

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