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Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.

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
Well
Jackals
Dried
Poets
Arguing
Poet
Poetry
Modern
Wells
Snarling

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The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
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Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
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The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
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There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.
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The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
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English Law: where there are two alternatives: one intelligent, one stupid one attractive, one vulgar one noble, one ape-like one serious and sincere, one undignified and false one far-sighted, one short EVERYBODY will INVARIABLY choose the latter.
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No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
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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.
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As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
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Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
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When in doubt, choose greatness.
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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.
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There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
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No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.
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We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
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For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
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What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?
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Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.
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Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.
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The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.
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