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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

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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
Thinking
Either
Animal
Literature
Clear
Stench
Others
Ceased
Human
Condemned
Humans
Misery
Love
Begin

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

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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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The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
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The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
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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.
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Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
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Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
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There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
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Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
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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.
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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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When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.
Cyril Connolly
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Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
Cyril Connolly
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There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another.
Cyril Connolly
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The artist secretes nostalgia around life.
Cyril Connolly
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An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly