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

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When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.
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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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When in doubt, choose greatness.
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The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.
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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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Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
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That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.
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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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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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How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?
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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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There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.
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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.
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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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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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No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
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For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
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Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.
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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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We fear something before we hate.
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