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The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.

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
States
Survival
Communication
Based
State
Society
American
Upon
Language
Flux

More quotes by 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.
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Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.
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The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
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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 true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
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The artist secretes nostalgia around life.
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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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When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.
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Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.
Cyril Connolly
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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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We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
Cyril Connolly
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It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
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 past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
Cyril Connolly
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We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.
Cyril Connolly
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Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.
Cyril Connolly
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Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.
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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That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.
Cyril Connolly
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Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
Cyril Connolly