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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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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
Surely
Suicide
Cease
Serve
Despair
Creative
Purpose
Ceases
Even
Justified

More quotes by 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.
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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 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
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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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Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.
Cyril Connolly
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There is immunity in reading, immunity in formal society, in office routine, in the company of old friends and in the giving of officious help to strangers, but there is no sanctuary in one bed from the memory of another. The past with its anguish will break through every defense-line of custom and habit we must sleep and therefore we must dream.
Cyril Connolly
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The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
Cyril Connolly
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Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.
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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No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
Cyril Connolly
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As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
Cyril Connolly
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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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No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.
Cyril Connolly
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The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
Cyril Connolly
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Sheep with a nasty side.
Cyril Connolly
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The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another.
Cyril Connolly