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Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.

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
Revenge
Aging
Intelligence
Intellectual
Genius
Talent
Upon
Longevity

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

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Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.
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Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
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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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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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Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.
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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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The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
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In a perfect union the man and woman are like a strung bow. Who is to say whether the string bends the bow, or the bow tightens the string?
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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.
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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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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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An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.
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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.
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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Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.
Cyril Connolly
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Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
Cyril Connolly
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The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.
Cyril Connolly
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Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.
Cyril Connolly
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The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.
Cyril Connolly
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The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
Cyril Connolly