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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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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
Good
Shyness
Arrives
Required
Author
Style
Language
Without
Writing
Performs

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

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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.
Cyril Connolly
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No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.
Cyril Connolly
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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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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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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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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.
Cyril Connolly
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The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
Cyril Connolly
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The artist secretes nostalgia around life.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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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
Cyril Connolly
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The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
Cyril Connolly
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Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.
Cyril Connolly
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There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
Cyril Connolly
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In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.
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
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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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Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.
Cyril Connolly
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Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.
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