Cyril Connolly Quotes & Sayings

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

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. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

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

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

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. — 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

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. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

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. — Cyril Connolly

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

Both my happiness and unhappiness I owe to the love of pleasure; of sex, travel, reading, conversation (hearing oneself talk), food, drink, cigars and lying in warm water. — Cyril Connolly

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. — Cyril Connolly

Friendships that last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from them. — 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 civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next. — Cyril Connolly

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. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

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

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. — 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

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

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

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. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

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

If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given to 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. — Cyril Connolly

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. — Cyril Connolly

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

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. — 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

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 discovered. — Cyril Connolly

Melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality; we run aground sooner than the flat-bottomed pleasure-lovers but we venture out in weather that would sink them and we choose our direction. — Cyril Connolly

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

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. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

A child, left to play alone, says of quite an easy thing, 'Now I am going to to do something very difficult'. Soon, out of vanity, fear and emptiness, he builds up a world of custom, convention and myth in which everything must be just so; certain doors are one-way streets, certain trees sacred, certain paths taboo. Then along comes a grown-up or a more robust child; they kick over the imaginary wall, climb the forbidden tree, regard the difficult as easy and the private world is destroyed. The instinct to create myth, to colonize reality with the emotions, remains. The myths become tyrannies until they are swept away, when we invent new tyrannies to hide our suddenly perceived nakedness. Like caddis-worms or like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom. — Cyril Connolly

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. — Cyril Connolly

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. — Cyril Connolly

Popular success is a palace built for a writer by publishers, journalists, admirers, and professional reputation makers, in which a silent army of termites, rats, dry rot, and death-watch beetles are tunnelling away, till, at the very moment of completion, it is ready to fall down. — Cyril Connolly

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

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. — 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

In the dream of approaching forty I saw myself as about to die and realized that I was no longer myself, but a creature inhabited entirely by parasites, as a caterpillar is occupied by the grubs of the ichneumon fly. Gin, whisky, sloth, fear, guilt, tobacco, had made themselves my inquilines; alcohol sloshed about within, while tendrils of melon and vine grew out of ears and nostrils; my mind was a worn gramophone record, my true self was such a ruin as to seem non-existent, and all this had happened in the last three years. — Cyril Connolly

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. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

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. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

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. — Cyril Connolly

The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream. — Cyril Connolly

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

No education is worth having that does not teach the lesson of concentration on a task, however unattractive. These lessons, if not learnt early, will be learnt, if at all, with pain and grief in later life. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The artist secretes nostalgia around life. — Cyril Connolly

A life based on reason will always require to be balanced by an occasional bout of violent and irrational emotion, for the instinctual drives must be satisfied. — Cyril Connolly

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

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. — 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

The detective story itself is in a dilemma. It is a vein which is in danger of being worked out, the demand is constant, the powers of supply variable, and the reader, with each one he absorbs, grows a little more sophisticated and harder to please, while the novelist, after each one he writes, becomes a little more exhausted. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

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

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. — Cyril Connolly

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? — Cyril Connolly

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

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

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

If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

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. — Cyril Connolly

The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave. — Cyril Connolly

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

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

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

When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide. For what better grounds for suicide can there be than to go on making the same series of false moves which invariably lead to the same disaster and to repeat a pattern without knowing why it is false or wherein lies the flaw? And yet to percieve that in ourselves revolves a cycle of activity which is certain to end in paralysis of the will, desertion, panic and despair - always to go on loving those who have ceased to love us, and who have quite lost all resemblance to the selves who we loved! Suicide is infectious; what if the agonies which suicide endure before they are driven to take their own life, the emotion of 'all is lost' - are infectious too? — Cyril Connolly

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. — Cyril Connolly

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

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 — Cyril Connolly