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The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.

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
True
Masterpiece
Task
Tasks
Consequence
Function
Produce
Writer
Literature

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

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It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
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That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.
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What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?
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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.
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An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.
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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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Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.
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Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
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Sheep with a nasty side.
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We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
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No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.
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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
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Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.
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Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
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Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
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The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
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Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be discovered.
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From now on - specialize never again make any concession to the ninety-nine percent of you which is like everyon else at the expense of the one percent which is unique.
Cyril Connolly
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We may assume that we keep people waiting symbolically because we do not wish to see them and that our anxiety is due not to being late, but to having to see them at all.
Cyril Connolly
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No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
Cyril Connolly