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Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.

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
Poet
Poetry
Modern
Wells
Snarling
Well
Jackals
Dried
Poets
Arguing

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The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.
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Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.
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Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.
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The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.
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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 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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Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.
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English Law: where there are two alternatives: one intelligent, one stupid one attractive, one vulgar one noble, one ape-like one serious and sincere, one undignified and false one far-sighted, one short EVERYBODY will INVARIABLY choose the latter.
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We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.
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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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Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be discovered.
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In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.
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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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Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
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Like the bee its sting, the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer.
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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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Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
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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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Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
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The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.
Cyril Connolly