Cyril Connolly Quotes

Literature is news that stays news.

The great thing about James Baldwin and his writing is that it's still fresh every time you pick it up. That's also the sad thing about his writing sometimes, too.

If your letters are as long as the bible, they will appear short to me. Only let them be brim full of affection.

The short story has been here and is here and will be here as long as we are.

We believe that games are a legitimate medium, as legitimate as literature, to talk about very dark and serious things.

Bob was very influenced by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. That huge type of creativity which takes nothing and makes it into something very wrenching.

'Hairspray' has never been irrelevant, which is, in some ways, heartbreaking.

I really care more about the human drama than I do the thriller stuff.

The films that have influenced me most are: 'The Hustler', 'Badlands', 'Hud', 'Tender Mercies', 'Cool Hand Luke', 'A Perfect World', and 'Laurence of Arabia'. I also really like 'Fletch'. I feel like all of these films reached an honest place in regard to the human condition while also stringing together really entertaining stories.

I've been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique.

I think that you don't really want to write a book that doesn't really move people and doesn't get them to think.

Mere recording of an event will not make it a historical document. It will become obsolete with time. Only those that emotionally connect with the audience will stand the test of time.

I was just a kid then. But I won't forget. Nor will others. There's lots of people with reason to hate the Church.

You need to have a reader's sympathy in order to accomplish anything. It's like at a reading, I find it's better to read something funny than to read something tragic. It just goes over better because you have a finite amount of time with somebody. Of course, in a book, you have a lot of time. But you still do want to make a certain impression right when you begin.

the great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.

Today a racist is synonymous with race hatred. Hating someone is a pretty unpleasant thing and few people are capable of hating others. Long-term hatred is a pathological disorder.

A book has to dig through the wounds, more, it has cause a new one, a book it has to be dangerous.

Racism does not have a good track record. It's been tried out for a long time and you'd think by now we'd want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.

As long as it's not an easy, outdated stereotype and it comes from an interesting or emotionally driven place, then anyone can be made fun of.

My readers think that I write for the day because my writings are based on the day. So I shall have to wait until my writings are obsolete. Then they may acquire timeliness.

I have a way to photograph. You work with space, you have a camera, you have a frame, and then a fraction of a second. It's very instinctive. What you do is a fraction of a second, it's there and it's not there. But in this fraction of a second comes your past, comes your future, comes your relation with people, comes your ideology, comes your hate, comes your love - all together in this fraction of a second, it materializes there.

Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril

I've been told that I am evil. I've been told that I am behind the persecution of millions of Americans. That I have encouraged hate toward gays. I've received both very brief and obscene messages, and very long and literate messages that tell me a vote for Crash was vote for homophobia.

A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.

Drawing the kind of comics that I do takes so long that to specifically address something as transitory as a political matter in it would be about as effective as composing a symphony with hopes that it would depose a despot. On top of that, I personally don't think that my version of art is the best way to deal with political issues at all, or, more specifically, the place to make a point. Not that art can't, but it's the rare art that still creates something lasting if its main aim was purely to change a particular unfair social structure.