Cyril Connolly Quotes & Sayings

#1. Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.

#2. Hemingway is great in that alone of living writers he has saturated his work with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love and the remorse which is the shadow of that sun.

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

#4. 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.

Cyril Connolly

#5. There is a way of leaving and yet of not leaving; of hinting that one loves and is willing to return, yet never coming back and so preserving a relationship in a lingering decay.

Cyril Connolly

#6. 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

#7. Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.

Cyril Connolly

#8. 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

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

Cyril Connolly

#10. While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.
Cyril Connolly (English critic and editor, 1903-1974)

Cyril Connolly

#11. 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

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

#14. M is for Marx
And clashing of classes
And movement of masses
And massing of asses.

Cyril Connolly

#15. Like many lazy people, once I started work I could not stop; perhaps that is why we avoid it.

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

#18. 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

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

Cyril Connolly

#20. Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

#22. Promise is the capacity for letting people down.

Cyril Connolly

#23. 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

Cyril Connolly

#24. 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

#25. 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

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

#28. 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

#29. We fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noises.

Cyril Connolly

#30. 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

#31. 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

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

Cyril Connolly

#33. The disasters of the world are due to its inhabitants not being able to grow old simultaneously. There is always a raw and intolerant nation eager to destroy the tolerant and mellow.

Cyril Connolly

#34. There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

#36. 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

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

Cyril Connolly

#38. The more I see of life the more I perceive that only through solitary communion with nature can one gain an idea of its richness and meaning.

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

#40. 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

#41. Failure on the other hand is infectious. The world is full of charming failures (for all charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others) and unless the writer is quite ruthless with these amiable footlers, they will drag him down with them.

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. Our memories are card-indexes consulted and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.

Cyril Connolly

#47. Sheep with a nasty side.

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

#49. 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

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

#53. When every unkind word about women has been said, we have still to admit, with Byron, that they are nicer than men. They are more devoted, more unselfish and more emotionally sincere. When the long fuse of cruelty, deceit and revenge is set alight, it is male thoughtlessness which has fired it.

Cyril Connolly

#54. When in doubt, choose greatness.

Cyril Connolly

#55. Why do ants alone have parasites whose intoxicating moistures they drink and for whom they will sacrifice even their young? Because as they are the most highly socialized of insects, so their lives are the most intolerable.

Cyril Connolly

#56. No opinions, no ideas, no real knowledge of anything, no ideals, no inspiration; a fat, slothful, querulous, greedy, impotent carcass; a stump, a decaying belly washed up on the shore ... Always tired, always bored, always hurt, always hating.

Cyril Connolly

#57. 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

#58. 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

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

Cyril Connolly

#60. 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

#61. 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.

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

#63. The greatest problem with women is how to contrive that they should seem our equals

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

#66. Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

#70. No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

#72. 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

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

Cyril Connolly

#74. That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

#78. We fear something before we hate it ...

Cyril Connolly

#79. Youth is a period of missed opportunities.

Cyril Connolly

#80. 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

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

#83. 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

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

Cyril Connolly

#85. Happiness lies in the fulfillment of the spirit through the body.

Cyril Connolly

#86. What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?

Cyril Connolly

#87. 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.

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

#89. 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

#90. 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

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

#93. 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

#94. Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom.

Cyril Connolly

#95. A rune for the very bored: when very bored say to yourself: It was during the next twenty minutes that there occurred one of those tiny incidents which revolutionizes the whole course of our life and alter the face of history. Truly we are the playthings of enormous fates.

Cyril Connolly