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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.

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
Solutions
Imagination
Snapshot
Art
Snapshots
Reality
Develops
Past
Liquid
Absent
Nostalgia
Solution

More quotes by 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.
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The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
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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 artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.
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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.
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Like the bee its sting, the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer.
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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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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.
Cyril Connolly
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Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.
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Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.
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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.
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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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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?
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?
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A woman's desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.
Cyril Connolly
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The disasters of the world are due to its inhabitants not being able to grow old simultaneously. There is always a raw and intolerant nation eager to destroy the tolerant and mellow.
Cyril Connolly
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Beautiful women must think about their beauty as capitalists think about their investments or politicians about their majorities it is all they have to insure their places in the world.
Cyril Connolly