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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.
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
People
Places
Civilization
Blot
Number
Prisons
Numbers
Maintained
Small
Altogether
Literature
Bombs
Need
Terrorism
Needs
Prison
More quotes by Cyril Connolly
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.
Cyril Connolly
Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.
Cyril Connolly
Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.
Cyril Connolly
Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
Cyril Connolly
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
Cyril Connolly
Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
Cyril Connolly
The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
Cyril Connolly
In a perfect union the man and woman are like a strung bow. Who is to say whether the string bends the bow, or the bow tightens the string?
Cyril Connolly
The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
Cyril Connolly
Like the bee its sting, the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer.
Cyril Connolly
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
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
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
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
An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.
Cyril Connolly
Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.
Cyril Connolly
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
The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.
Cyril Connolly
We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
Cyril Connolly
Sheep with a nasty side.
Cyril Connolly
