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The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

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
Member
Members
Pay
Class
Artist
Art
Leisured
Cannot
Classes
Leisure

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

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The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.
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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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Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
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We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
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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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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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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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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.
Cyril Connolly
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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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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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That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.
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Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.
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Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
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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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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.
Cyril Connolly
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We fear something before we hate.
Cyril Connolly
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Sheep with a nasty side.
Cyril Connolly
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Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.
Cyril Connolly
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Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
Cyril Connolly
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Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
Cyril Connolly