Cyril Connolly Quotations

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

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

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

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

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

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, - something more than we could learn ourselves, from a book

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

There is no fury like a woman searching for a new lover

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

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

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

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

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.

The ape-like virtues without which no one can enjoy a public school.

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.

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.

There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another.

Two weeks before his death, a friend asked him half jokingly if he had discovered any meaning in life. "Yes," he replied, "there is a meaning; at least, for me, there is one thing that matters - to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people."

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

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.

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.

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

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

A great writer created 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.

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

The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.

A mutually fulfilled sexual union between two people is the rarest sensation which life can provide. But it is not quite real. It stops when the telephone rings. Such a passion can be kept at its early strength only by adding to it either more and more unhappiness (jealousy, separation, doubt, renunciation), or more and more artificiality (drink, technique, stage-illusions). Whoever has missed this has never lived, who lives for it alone is but partly alive.

Sheep with a nasty side.

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

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

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 it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

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

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

There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another... It is when we begin to hurt those whom we love that the guilt with which we are born becomes intolerable, and since all those whom we love intensely and continuously grow part of us, and since we hate ourselves in them, so we torture ourselves and them together.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.