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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
Despair
Creative
Purpose
Ceases
Even
Justified
Surely
Suicide
Cease
Serve

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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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There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
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Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.
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Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.
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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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It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
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Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.
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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.
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Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
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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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Hemingway is great in that alone of living writers he has saturated his work with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love and the remorse which is the shadow of that sun.
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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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Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
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No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.
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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.
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When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.
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For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
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.
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The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.
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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