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Cyril Connolly -
Enemies of Promise (1938)
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Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques.
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.
Cyril Connolly
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In the eighteenth century he would have become Prime Minister before he was thirty; as it was he appeared honourably ineligible for the struggle of life.
On home
Cyril Connolly
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Carelessness is not fatal to journalism, nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once; a journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow.
Cyril Connolly
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We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.
Cyril Connolly
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When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
Cyril Connolly
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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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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.
Cyril Connolly
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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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To this period [age seven] I trace my worst faults. Indecision, for I found that by hesitating for a long time over two toys in a shop I would be given both and so was tempted to make two alternatives always seem equally attractive; Ingratitude, for I grew so used to having what I wanted that I assumed it as a right; Laziness, for sloth is the especial vice of tyrants; the Impatience with boredom that is generated by devotion; the Cruelty which comes from a knowledge of power and the Giving way to moods, for I learnt that sulking, crying, moping and malingering were bluffs that paid.
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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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 lesson one can learn from Firbank is that of inconsequence. There is the vein which he tapped and which has not yet been fully exploited.
Cyril Connolly
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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
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So wrote Pater, calling an art-for-art's sake muezzin to the faithful from the topmost turret of the ivory tower.
Cyril Connolly
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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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It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
Cyril Connolly
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Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.
Young writers if they are to mature require a period of between three and seven years in which to live down their promise. Promise is like the mediaeval hangman who after settling the noose, pushed his victim off the platform and jumped on his back, his weight acting a drop while his jockeying arms prevented the unfortunate from loosening the rope. When he judged him dead he dropped to the ground.
Cyril Connolly
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The refractory pupil of Socrates, Aristippus the Cyrene, who believed happiness to be the sum of particular pleasures and golden moments and not, as Epicurus, a prolonged intermediary state between ecstasy and pain.
Cyril Connolly
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I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.
Cyril Connolly
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Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.
Cyril Connolly
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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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You imply our education is of no use to you in after life. But no education is. We are not an employment agency; all we can do is to give you a grounding in the art of mixing with your fellow men, to tell you what to expect from life and give you an outward manner and inward poise, an old prescription from the eighteenth century which we call a classical education, an education which confers the infrequent virtues of good sense and good taste and the benefit of dual nationality, English and Mediterranean, and which, taking into account the difficulties of modern life, we find the philosophy best able to overcome them.
Cyril Connolly
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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 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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I have called this style the Mandarin style, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.
Cyril Connolly
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Quote of the day
Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
Robert F. Kennedy
Cyril Connolly
Born:
September 10, 1903
Died:
November 26, 1974
(aged 71)
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