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Quotes by Cyril Connolly

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
– Cyril Connolly
A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.
– Cyril Connolly
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
All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
– Cyril Connolly
Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.
– Cyril Connolly
Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.
– Cyril Connolly
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
– Cyril Connolly
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
For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
– Cyril Connolly
Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.
– Cyril Connolly
Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
– Cyril Connolly
Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.
– Cyril Connolly
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
It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.
– Cyril Connolly
Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.
– Cyril Connolly
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
– Cyril Connolly
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
– Cyril Connolly
No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, - something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.
– Cyril Connolly
No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.
– Cyril Connolly
Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
– Cyril Connolly
Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
– Cyril Connolly
Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
– Cyril Connolly
The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.
– Cyril Connolly
The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.
– Cyril Connolly
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
The dread of lonliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
– Cyril Connolly
The headmistress was an able instructress in French and history and we learned with her as fast as fear could teach us.
– Cyril Connolly
The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.
– Cyril Connolly
The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
– Cyril Connolly
The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.
– Cyril Connolly
The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
– Cyril Connolly
The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.
– Cyril Connolly
There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
– Cyril Connolly
There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives.
– Cyril Connolly
Truth is a river that is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between the arms the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the main river.
– Cyril Connolly
Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life.
– Cyril Connolly
We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
– Cyril Connolly
We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.
– Cyril Connolly
When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.
– Cyril Connolly
Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.
– Cyril Connolly
Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
– Cyril Connolly
The hunt for young authors who, while maintaining a prestige value (with a rôle for Ingrid Bergman), may yet somehow win the coveted jackpot, is feverish and incessant. Last year's authors (most of the names that have just reached England) are pushed aside and this year's—the novelist Jean Stafford, her poet husband Robert Lowell, or the dark horse, Truman Capote—are invariably mentioned. They may be quite unread, but their names, like a new issue on the market, are constantly on the lips of those in the know. Get Capote—at this minute the words are resounding on many a sixtieth floor, and get him of course means make him and break him, smother him with laurels and then vent on him the obscure hatred inherent in the notion of another's superiority.
– Cyril Connolly
Nothing dates like hate and in literature a little of it goes a very long way.
– Cyril Connolly
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turn before we have learnt to walk.
– Cyril Connolly
In the sex-war thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male,vindictiveness of the female.
– Cyril Connolly
Promise is the capacity for letting people down.
– Cyril Connolly
We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life; it is because we tire of our responsibility.
– Cyril Connolly
A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossing with oneself, malignant and ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality.
– Cyril Connolly
Everything is a dangerous drug except reality, which is unendurable.
– Cyril Connolly
Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first call promising.
– Cyril Connolly
Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
– Cyril Connolly
Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.
– Cyril Connolly
There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
– Cyril Connolly
The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
– Cyril Connolly
Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
– Cyril Connolly
Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.
– Cyril Connolly
As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
– Cyril Connolly