Quote

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.

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
Number
Prisons
Numbers
Maintained
Small
Altogether
Literature
Bombs
Need
Terrorism
Needs
Prison
People
Places
Civilization
Blot

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

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Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.
Cyril Connolly
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Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.
Cyril Connolly
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There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives.
Cyril Connolly
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Hemingway is great in that alone of living writers he has saturated his work with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love and the remorse which is the shadow of that sun.
Cyril Connolly
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There is immunity in reading, immunity in formal society, in office routine, in the company of old friends and in the giving of officious help to strangers, but there is no sanctuary in one bed from the memory of another. The past with its anguish will break through every defense-line of custom and habit we must sleep and therefore we must dream.
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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Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
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 reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
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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There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another.
Cyril Connolly
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That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.
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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Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.
Cyril Connolly
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Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.
Cyril Connolly
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The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
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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The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.
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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Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.
Cyril Connolly