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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
Leisure
Member
Members
Pay
Class
Artist
Art
Leisured
Cannot
Classes
More quotes by Cyril Connolly
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
The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.
Cyril Connolly
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
We fear something before we hate.
Cyril Connolly
There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives.
Cyril Connolly
Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
Cyril Connolly
The artist secretes nostalgia around life.
Cyril Connolly
When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.
Cyril Connolly
The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.
Cyril Connolly
Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.
Cyril Connolly
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.
Cyril Connolly
Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.
Cyril Connolly
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
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
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.
Cyril Connolly
It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.
Cyril Connolly
Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.
Cyril Connolly
There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.
Cyril Connolly
Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
Cyril Connolly
When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
Cyril Connolly
