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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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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
Moving
Stations
Hands
Clock
Like
Son
Forward
Move
Spurts
Grow
Clocks
Boys
Railway
Grows
Gradually

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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.
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Hemingway is great in that alone of living writers he has saturated his work with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love and the remorse which is the shadow of that sun.
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No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.
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When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
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The artist secretes nostalgia around life.
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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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It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
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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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Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.
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We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
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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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For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
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The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
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The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
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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 friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.
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There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
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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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Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
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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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