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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.

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
Writer
Stupid
Firsts
Severe
First
Discovering
Time
Shock
Think
Stupidity
Thinking
Younger
People
Intelligent

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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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Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
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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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A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious retreat of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.
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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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Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
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In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.
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Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
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That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.
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Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
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It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.
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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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Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.
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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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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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The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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When we have ceased to love the stench of the human animal, either in others or in ourselves, then are we condemned to misery, and clear thinking can begin.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
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