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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
Wells
Snarling
Well
Jackals
Dried
Poets
Arguing
Poet
Poetry
Modern

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Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
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We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.
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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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We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
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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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Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.
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Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.
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There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.
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The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
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The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
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An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.
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There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another.
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The disasters of the world are due to its inhabitants not being able to grow old simultaneously. There is always a raw and intolerant nation eager to destroy the tolerant and mellow.
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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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Hate is the consequence of fear we fear something before we hate a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.
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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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Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.
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Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
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Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.
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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.
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