“It is by a blend of lively curiosity and intelligent selfishness that the artists who wish to mature late, who feel too old to die, the Goethes, Tolstoys, Voltaires, Titians and Verdis, reach a fruitful senescence. They cannot afford to associate with those who are burning themselves up or preparing for a tragedy or whom melancholy has marked for her own. Not for them the accident-prone, the friend in whom the desire for self-destruction keeps blistering out in broken legs or threatening them in anxiety-neuroses. Not for them the drumming finger, the close-cropt nail, the chewed glasses, the pause on the threshold, the wandering eye, or the repeated ‘um’ and ‘er.”

— Cyril Connolly , book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 2: The Charlock’s Shade, Ch. 16: Outlook Unsettled (p. 137)

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Cyril Connolly 49

British author 1903–1974

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