Cyril Connolly Art Quotations

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

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

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 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.

The artist secretes nostalgia around life.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.

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.