CYRIL CONNOLLY

(Cyril Vernon Connolly)


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Cyril Connolly

Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
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Cyril Connolly

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 encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.
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Cyril Connolly

There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear is lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, our popularity, our vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may be able to cease from hating... Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate; a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.
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Cyril Connolly

The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
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Cyril Connolly

Two weeks before his death, a friend asked him half jokingly if he had discovered any meaning in life. "Yes," he replied, "there is a meaning; at least, for me, there is one thing that matters - to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people."
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Cyril Connolly

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
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Cyril Connolly

The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.
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Cyril Connolly

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
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Cyril Connolly

Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
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Cyril Connolly

Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.
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Cyril Connolly
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Cyril Connolly
  • Born: September 10, 1903
  • Died: November 26, 1974
  • Nationality: English
  • Profession: Author
Biography

Cyril Vernon Connolly was an English literary critic and writer. He was the editor of the influential literary magazine Horizon (1940–49) and wrote Enemies of Promise (1938), which combined literary criticism with an autobiographical exploration of why he failed to become the successful author of fiction that he had aspired to be in his youth.

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