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The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.

Cyril Connolly

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Cyril Connolly
Age: 71 †
Born: 1903
Born: September 10
Died: 1974
Died: November 26
Critic
Literary Critic
Novelist
Writer
Coventry
England
UK
Cyril Vernon Connolly
Littles
Shore
Little
Wave
Always
Calm
Life
Harmony
Existence
Secret
Literature
Farther
Success
Wash

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

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Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.
Cyril Connolly
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When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.
Cyril Connolly
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Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
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It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.
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The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization the factors of decadence, -- luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, -- are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
Cyril Connolly
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It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
Cyril Connolly
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An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.
Cyril Connolly
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Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.
Cyril Connolly
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When we have ceased to love the stench of the human animal, either in others or in ourselves, then are we condemned to misery, and clear thinking can begin.
Cyril Connolly
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Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
Cyril Connolly
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Industrial society seems likely to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems
Cyril Connolly
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Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.
Cyril Connolly
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When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.
Cyril Connolly
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Carelessness is not fatal to journalism, nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once a journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow.
Cyril Connolly
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Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
Cyril Connolly
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Failure on the other hand is infectious. The world is full of charming failures (for all charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others) and unless the writer is quite ruthless with these amiable footlers, they will drag him down with them.
Cyril Connolly
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As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
Cyril Connolly
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When in doubt, choose greatness.
Cyril Connolly
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Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.
Cyril Connolly
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The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.
Cyril Connolly