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There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.

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
Hall
Halls
Atheism
Enemy
Literature
Pram
Art
Prams
Good
Sombre
Somber

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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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In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.
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A woman's desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.
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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.
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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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The lesson one can learn from Firbank is that of inconsequence. There is the vein which he tapped and which has not yet been fully exploited.
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Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
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English Law: where there are two alternatives: one intelligent, one stupid one attractive, one vulgar one noble, one ape-like one serious and sincere, one undignified and false one far-sighted, one short EVERYBODY will INVARIABLY choose the latter.
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Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.
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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.
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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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Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.
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Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.
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Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
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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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When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
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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Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.
Cyril Connolly
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Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
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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.
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