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Age
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When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.
-Cyril Connolly
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Art
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The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.
-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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Authors & Writing
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Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be read once.
-Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise, 1938
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A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
-Cyril Connolly
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The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.
-Cyril Connolly
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When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.
-Cyril Connolly
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Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
-Cyril Connolly
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The hunt for young authors who, while maintaining a prestige value (with a r
-Cyril Connolly, Blueprint for a Silver Age: Notes On a Visit to America, "Harper's Magazine", December, 1947
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I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits. It is the style of all the writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean to and more than they feel. It is the style of most artists and all humbug.
-Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise
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Body, the
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If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given us to be denied at every turn, if our nature is always wrong and wicked, how ineffectual we are - like fishes not meant to swim.
-Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave
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Books
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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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City Life, Cities
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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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Civilization
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Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the present with the past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Pr?s: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.
-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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Conscience
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When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?
-Cyril Connolly
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Conversation
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The only happy talkers are dandies who extract pleasure from the very perishability of their material and who would not be able to tolerate the isolation of all other forms of composition; for most good talkers, when they have run down, are miserable; they know that they have betrayed themselves, that they have taken material which should have a life of its own, to dispense it in noises upon the air.
-Cyril Connolly
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Corruption
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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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Crime
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Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
-Cyril Connolly
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Criticism
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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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Diets and Dieting
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Imprisoned in every fat man, a thin one is wildly signaling to be let out.
-Cyril Connolly
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Education
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Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.
-Cyril Connolly
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Ego
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All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
Enemies of Promise is Connolly's autobiography where he attempted to explain why he failed to produce the literary masterpiece which he and others believed he should have been capable of writing.
-Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise, 1938
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Epitaphs
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Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph -- green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.
-Cyril Connolly
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Exile
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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.
-Cyril Connolly
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Books by and about Cyril Connolly