Cyril Connolly Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life. — Cyril Connolly

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. — Cyril Connolly

Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

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

Sheep with a nasty side. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius. — 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

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. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

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

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. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

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. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

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

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

We fear something before we hate it ... — Cyril Connolly

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

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

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

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

Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last. — Cyril Connolly

The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food. — Cyril Connolly

The more I see of life the more I perceive that only through solitary communion with nature can one gain an idea of its richness and meaning. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

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

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

A woman's desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

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

We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

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

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

Youth is a period of missed opportunities. — Cyril Connolly

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

No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian. — Cyril Connolly

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

Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose. — 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 artist secretes nostalgia around life. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

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

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

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

Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils. — Cyril Connolly

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. — Cyril Connolly

No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

He [George Orwell] would not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry. — Cyril Connolly

There is no suicide for which all society is not responsible. — Cyril Connolly

That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center. — Cyril Connolly

Our memories are card-indexes consulted and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control. — 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

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

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

Nothing dates like hate and in literature a little of it goes a very long way. — Cyril Connolly

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

It is closing time in the gardens of the West. — Cyril Connolly

The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next. — Cyril Connolly

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

What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine? — Cyril Connolly

Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations. — Cyril Connolly

Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectified. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking. — Cyril Connolly

There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover. — Cyril Connolly

In a perfect union the man and woman are like a strung bow. Who is to say whether the string bends the bow, or the bow tightens the string? — Cyril Connolly

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

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

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
[The New Statesman, February 25, 1933] — Cyril Connolly

The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest. — Cyril Connolly

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

Like the bee its sting, the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer. — Cyril Connolly

It is a consolation of human life that the sick forget what it is like to feel well, or the miserable to be happy. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

Happiness lies in the fulfillment of the spirit through the body. — Cyril Connolly