Quote #2

Destroy him as you will, the bourgeois always bounces up - execute him, expropriate him, starve him out en masse, and he reappears in your children.

More from Cyril Connolly

  1. Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
  2. He reduced everything to politics; he was also unalterably of the Left. His line may have been unpopular or unfashionable, but he followed …
  3. I greet you, my educated fellow bourgeois, whose interests and whose doubts I share.
  4. I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as po…
  5. The Mandarin style at its best yields the richest and most complete expression of the English language. It is the diction of Donne, Browne,…
  6. Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate tech…
  7. We write in the language of Dryden and Addison, of Milton and Shakespeare, but the intellectual world we inhabit is that of Flaubert and Ba…
  8. The lesson one can learn from Firbank is that of inconsequence. There is the vein which he tapped and which has not yet been fully exploite…

All Cyril Connolly quotes