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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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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
Grows
Gradually
Moving
Stations
Hands
Clock
Like
Son
Forward
Move
Spurts
Grow
Clocks
Boys
Railway

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No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
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From now on - specialize never again make any concession to the ninety-nine percent of you which is like everyon else at the expense of the one percent which is unique.
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Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.
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If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.
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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.
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The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.
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The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.
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For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
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Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.
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An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.
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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?
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No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
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We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.
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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
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The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
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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.
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We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
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Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.
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The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
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Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
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