Cyril Connolly Quotes

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.

The headmistress was an able instructress in French and history and we learned with her as fast as fear could teach us.

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

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

The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.

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

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

When in doubt, choose greatness.

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

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

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

Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.

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

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

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

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

We fear something before we hate.

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.

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

Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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