Al Alvarez Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

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

Al Alvarez

#4. I'm good at reading people.

Al Alvarez

#5. Yes, I think poker really isn't gambling.

Al Alvarez

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. I absolutely don't believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.

Al Alvarez

#12. 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

#13. No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.

Al Alvarez

#14. The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.

Al Alvarez

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. I could think of worse ways of going than at the poker table.

Al Alvarez

#18. When you make a bet, you're saying something.

Al Alvarez

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. The fact that we write about it doesn't mean we play better than ordinary players at all.

Al Alvarez

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it's a kind of risky trade.

Al Alvarez

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

Al Alvarez

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

Al Alvarez

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

Al Alvarez