Cyril Connolly Quotes (82 Quotes)

The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.

The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.

It is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.

I have always disliked myself at any given moment the total of such moments is my life

We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do

Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.

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.

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

The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization the factors of decadence, -- luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, -- are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

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.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

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.

Youth is a period of missed opportunities.

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.

All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.

Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.

There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.

It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.

The person who is master of their passions is reason's slave.

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.

No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.

There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well.

The man who is master of his passions is reason's slave

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

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turn before we have learnt to walk

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.

Never would it occur to a child that a sheep, a pig, a cow or a chicken was good to eat, while, like Milton's Adam, he would eagerly make a meal off fruits, nuts, thyme, mint, peas and broad beans which penetrate further and stimulate not only the appetite but other vague and deep nostalgias. We are closer to the Vegetable Kingdom than we know is it not for man alone that mint, thyme, sage, and rosemary exhale ''crush me and eat me'' -- for us that opium poppy, coffee-berry, tea-plant and vine perfect themselves Their aim is to be absorbed by us, even if it can only be achieved by attaching themselves to roast mutton.

It is the fear of middle-age in the young, of old-age in the middle-aged, which is the prime cause of infidelity, that infallible rejuvenator

The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike.

Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.

We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.

If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given us to be denied at every turn, if our nature is always wrong and wicked, how ineffectual we are - like fishes not meant to swim

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.

Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.

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.

Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph -- green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.

As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.

The English masses are lovable they are kind, decent, tolerant, practical and not stupid. The tragedy is that they are too many of them, and that they are aimless, having outgrown the servile functions for which they were encouraged to multiply. One day these huge crowds will have to seize power because there will be nothing else for them to do, and yet they neither demand power nor are ready to make use of it they will learn only to be bored in a new way.

The greatest problem with women is how to contrive that they should seem our equals

A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.

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 wi

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.

While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living