Cyril Connolly Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.

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

Industrial society seems likely to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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 is no suicide for which all society is not responsible.

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

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.

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

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.

Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.

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.

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

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

Youth is a period of missed opportunities.

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

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

That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.

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

No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?

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

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