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

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A woman's desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.
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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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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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Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.
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I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.
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The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.
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When in doubt, choose greatness.
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The artist secretes nostalgia around life.
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We create the world in which we live if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.
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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.
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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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We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.
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How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?
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Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
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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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No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
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As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
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We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
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No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
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Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.
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