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The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

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
Literature
Past
Thing
Smells
Cynical
Smell
Sweet
Dead

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

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Hate is the consequence of fear we fear something before we hate a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.
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Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.
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There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.
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There is immunity in reading, immunity in formal society, in office routine, in the company of old friends and in the giving of officious help to strangers, but there is no sanctuary in one bed from the memory of another. The past with its anguish will break through every defense-line of custom and habit we must sleep and therefore we must dream.
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A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious retreat of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.
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In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.
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Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
Cyril Connolly
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If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.
Cyril Connolly
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The artist secretes nostalgia around life.
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Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
Cyril Connolly
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The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.
Cyril Connolly
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The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
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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How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?
Cyril Connolly
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In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.
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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No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
Cyril Connolly
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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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When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly