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Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.

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
Passion
Infatuated
Infatuation
Avarice
Purity
Folly
Ignorance
Darkness
Wisdom
Engenders

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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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There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
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The artist secretes nostalgia around life.
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The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.
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Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
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Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.
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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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Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.
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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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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?
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Happiness lies in the fulfillment of the spirit through the body.
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We may assume that we keep people waiting symbolically because we do not wish to see them and that our anxiety is due not to being late, but to having to see them at all.
Cyril Connolly
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The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
Cyril Connolly
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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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When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.
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.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
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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Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.
Cyril Connolly
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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