Cyril Connolly Quotes (82 Quotes)

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.

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

Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.

When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.

In America every woman has her set of girl-friends some are cousins, the rest are gained at school. These form a permanent committee who sit on each other's affairs, who ''come out'' together, marry and divorce together, and who end as those groups of bustling, heartless well-informed club-women who govern society. Against them the Couple of Ehepaar is helpless and Man in their eyes but a biological interlude.

Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.

Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.

Except for poverty, incompatibility, opposition of parents, absence of love on one side and of desire to marry on both, nothing stands in the way of our happy union.

Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.

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-PrTs 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.

The dread of lonliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.

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.

The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.

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

The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.

A best-seller is the golden touch of mediocre talent.

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.

He could not blow his nose without moralizing on the state of the handkerchief industry

For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?

The only happy talkers are dandies who extract pleasure from the very perishability of their material and who would not be able to tolerate the isolation of all other forms of composition for most good talkers, when they have run down, are miserable they know that they have betrayed themselves, that they have taken material which should have a life of its own, to dispense it in noises upon the air.

Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.

Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils

There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.

In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.

The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.

If one is too lazy to think, too vain to do a thing badly, too cowardly to admit it, one will never attain wisdom.

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.

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life.

When we have ceased to love the stench of the human animal, either in others or in ourselves, then are we condemned to misery, and clear thinking can begin.