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When in doubt, choose greatness.

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
Doubt
Greatness
Choose

More quotes by 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 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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As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
Cyril Connolly
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Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
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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Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
Cyril Connolly
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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
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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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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.
Cyril Connolly
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No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
Cyril Connolly
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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
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Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.
Cyril Connolly
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An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.
Cyril Connolly
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Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.
Cyril Connolly
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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?
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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Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.
Cyril Connolly
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No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
Cyril Connolly
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The disasters of the world are due to its inhabitants not being able to grow old simultaneously. There is always a raw and intolerant nation eager to destroy the tolerant and mellow.
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