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When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.

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
Writing
Scatter
Shades
Purple
Shade
Prose
Evening
Dark
Write

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

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Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
Cyril Connolly
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For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
Cyril Connolly
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I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.
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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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In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.
Cyril Connolly
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Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
Cyril Connolly
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The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization the factors of decadence, -- luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, -- are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
Cyril Connolly
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Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.
Cyril Connolly
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Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be discovered.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
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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It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
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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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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In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.
Cyril Connolly
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We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.
Cyril Connolly
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Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
Cyril Connolly
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The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
Cyril Connolly
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We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
Cyril Connolly
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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