Cyril Connolly Quotes

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

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

In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient; afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.

Neither harsh reviews, the contempt of equals nor the indifference of superiors can affect those who have once tapped the great heart of suffering humanity and found out what a goldmine it is.

From now on - specialize; never again make any concession to the ninety-nine percent of you which is like everyon else at the expense of the one percent which is unique.

We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion.

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

Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.

We fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noises.

No opinions, no ideas, no real knowledge of anything, no ideals, no inspiration; a fat, slothful, querulous, greedy, impotent carcass; a stump, a decaying belly washed up on the shore ... Always tired, always bored, always hurt, always hating.

Is it possible to love any human being without being torn limb from limb?

Approaching forty, I had a singular dream in which I almost grasped the meaning and understood the nature of what it is that wastes in wasted time.

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.

Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.

Hemingway is great in that alone of living writers he has saturated his work with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love and the remorse which is the shadow of that sun.

It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.

Why do ants alone have parasites whose intoxicating moistures they drink and for whom they will sacrifice even their young? Because as they are the most highly socialized of insects, so their lives are the most intolerable.

Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.

When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.

English Law: where there are two alternatives: one intelligent, one stupid; one attractive, one vulgar; one noble, one ape-like; one serious and sincere, one undignified and false; one far-sighted, one short; EVERYBODY will INVARIABLY choose the latter.

The Expulsion from Eden is an act of vindictive womanish spite; the Fall of Man, as recounted in the Bible, comes nearer to the Fall of God.

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

Early laurels weigh like lead and of many of the boys whom I knew at Eton, I can say that their lives are over ... Once again romanticism with its death wish is to blame, for it lays an emphasis on childhood, on a fall from grace which is not compensated for by any doctrine of future redemption.

Beautiful women must think about their beauty as capitalists think about their investments or politicians about their majorities; it is all they have to insure their places in the world.

While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

M is for Marx
And clashing of classes
And movement of masses
And massing of asses.

Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.

The headmistress was an able instructress in French and history and we learned with her as fast as fear could teach us.

Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom.

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.

There is a way of leaving and yet of not leaving; of hinting that one loves and is willing to return, yet never coming back and so preserving a relationship in a lingering decay.

Everyone has the right to express an opinion. No one has the right to be listened to.

We fear something before we hate it ...

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.

Most of the beauty of women evaporates when they achieve domestic happiness at the price of their independence.

Streets of Paris, pray for me; beaches in the sun, pray for me; ghosts of the lemurs, intercede for me; plane-tree and laurel-rose, shade me; summer rain on quays of Toulon, wash me away.

Never will I make that extra effort to live according to reality which alone makes good writing possible: hence the manic-depressiveness of my style, - which is either bright, cruel and superficial; or pessimistic; moth-eaten with self-pity

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

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

The refractory pupil of Socrates, Aristippus the Cyrene, who believed happiness to be the sum of particular pleasures and golden moments and not, as Epicurus, a prolonged intermediary state between ecstasy and pain.

We pay for vice by the knowledge that we are wicked; we pay for pleasure when we find out too late that we are nothing.

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. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it, or having drawn the conclusion, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked! Writers always hope that their next book is going to be their best, and will not acknowledge that they are prevented by their present way of life from ever creating anything different.

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.

Sheep with a nasty side.

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

Youth is a period of missed opportunities.

The true work of art is the one which the seventh wave of genius throws up the beach where the undertow of time cannot drag it back.

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

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

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.

Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.

Two fears alternate in marriage, of loneliness and of bondage. The dread of loneliness being keener than the fear of bondage, we get married. For one person who fears being thus tied there are four who dread being set free. Yet the love of liberty is a noble passion and one to which most married people secretly aspire, -- in moments when they are not neurotically dependent -- but by then it is too late; the ox does not become a bull, not the hen a falcon.

The fear of loneliness can be overcome, for it springs from weakness; human beings are intended to be free, and to be free is to be lonely, but the fear of bondage is the apprehension of a real danger, and so I find it all the more pathetic to watch young men and beautiful girls taking refuge in marriage from an imaginary danger, a sad loss to their friends ad a sore trial to each other. First love is the one most worth having, yet the best marriage is often the second, for we should marry only when the desire for freedom be spent; not till then does a man know whether he is the kind who can settle down. The most tragic breakings-up are of those couples who have married young and who have enjoyed seven years of happiness, after which the banked fires of passion and independence explode -- and without knowing why, for they still love each other, they set about accomplishing their common destruction.

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

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

We may assume that we keep people waiting symbolically because we do not wish to see them and that our anxiety is due not to being late, but to having to see them at all.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.

Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment.

Only by avoiding the beginning of things can we escape their end.

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 exploited.

When every unkind word about women has been said, we have still to admit, with Byron, that they are nicer than men. They are more devoted, more unselfish and more emotionally sincere. When the long fuse of cruelty, deceit and revenge is set alight, it is male thoughtlessness which has fired it.

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.

There are only three things which make life worth living: to be writing a tolerably good book, to be in a dinner party of six, and to be traveling south with someone whom your conscience permits you to love.

Like many lazy people, once I started work I could not stop; perhaps that is why we avoid it.

Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.

Art is made by the alone for the alone ... The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication ...

Friendships that last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from them.

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

An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.

There is no suicide for which all society is not responsible.

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 will break through every defense-line of custom and habit; we must sleep and therefore we must dream.

Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.

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

Young writers if they are to mature require a period of between three and seven years in which to live down their promise. Promise is like the mediaeval hangman who after settling the noose, pushed his victim off the platform and jumped on his back, his weight acting a drop while his jockeying arms prevented the unfortunate from loosening the rope. When he judged him dead he dropped to the ground.

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

A stone lies in a river; a piece of wood is jammed against it; dead leaves, drifting logs, and branches caked with mud collect; weeds settle there, and soon birds have made a nest and are feeding their young among the blossoming water plants. Then the river rises and the earth is washed away. The birds depart, the flowers wither, the branches are dislodged and drift downward; no trace is left of the floating island but a stone submerged by the water; - such is our personality.

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

A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossed with oneself, malignant and ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality.

Beneath this mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivilous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit ridden, I let it reform.

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

The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

Carelessness is not fatal to journalism, nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once; a journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow.

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.

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

That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.

In my religion, there would be no exclusive doctrine; all would be love, poetry, and doubt.

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.

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

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

It is significant comment on the victory of science over magic that were someone to say 'if I put this pill in your beer it will explode,' we might believe them; but were they to cry 'if I pronounce this spell over your beer it will go flat,' we should remain incredulous and Paracelsus, the Alchemists, Aleister Crowley and all the Magi have lived in vain. Yet when I read science I turn magical; when I study magic, scientific.

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

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

The books I haven't written are better than the books other people have.

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

He felt old and miserable, going through life trying to peddle a personality of which people would not even accept a free sample.

Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.

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.

When once we have discovered how pain and suffering diminish the personality and how joy alone increases it, then the morbid attraction which is felt for evil, pain and abnormality will have lost its power. Why do we reward our men of genius, our suicides, our madmen and the generally maladjusted with the melancholy honours of a posthumous curiosity? Because we know that it is our society which has condemned these men to death and which is guilty because, out of its own ignorance and malformation, it has persecuted those who were potential saviours; smiters of the rock who might have touched the spring of healing and brought us back into harmony with ourselves. Somehow, then, and without going mad, we must learn from these madmen to reconcile fanaticism with serenity. Either one, taken alone, is disastrous, yet except through the integration of these two opposites there can be no great art and no profound happiness--and what else is worth having? For nothing can be accomplished without fanaticism and without serenity nothing can be enjoyed.

How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?

Dining out is a vice, a dissipation of spirit punished by remorse. We eat, drink, and talk a little too much, abuse all our friends, belch out our literary preferences and are egged on by accomplices in the audience to acts of mental exhibitionism. Such evenings cannot fail to diminish those who take part in them. They end on Monkey Hill.