Top 100 Connolly Quotes
#1. Puck Connolly," says the old man. "Don't be looking at him like that." Such a statement is too tantalizing to ignore. "Who is he?" "Lord, that's Sean Kendrick,
Maggie Stiefvater
#2. 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
#3. Someone - Cyril Connolly? Ezra Pound? - once said that anything that can be read twice is literature; I would say that anything that bears saying twice is quotable.
Joseph Epstein
#4. I would love to direct a feature and have Robert Connolly produce it. That would be really fab.
David Wenham
#5. My first hero, as a teenager, was James Connolly. I remember discovering that he was a feminist, and that was an eye-opener, coming from a man of such poverty.
Frances O'Grady
#6. That's the one. In Puck Connolly's custody. That might be the last I see of that jacket.
Maggie Stiefvater
#7. I didn't say I would start a yard."
"You didn't have to. I'll come back next year and you'll have a nest of horses outside your window and Puck Connolly in your bed and I'll buy from you instead of Malvern. That's your future for you.
Maggie Stiefvater
#8. I have another horse, Kate Connolly, if you want to ride one of the capaill uisce
Maggie Stiefvater
#9. The three people I've always wanted to meet are Stephen Fry, Billy Connolly and Steven Gerrard.
Andrew Buchan
#10. When I hit the scene, there was Billy Connolly and Max Boyce. It was all mother-in-law and Irish jokes, and we broke the mould. Now there are thousands of comedians out there, and I don't think I can be above it all.
Jasper Carrott
#11. Cyril Connolly, twentieth-century writer and critic, wrote that 'words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.' That was how I wanted to use books: as an escape back to life. I wanted to engulf myself in books and come up whole again.
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Nina Sankovitch
#12. Once you become successful, people know where you live, the type of house you live in, the kind of car you drive, the clothes you wear, and so it would be patronising to go and talk like a welder. Welding's a mystery to me now. You can't go back, your life changes every day.
Billy Connolly
#13. Don't be 'practical' in politics. To be practical in that sense means that you have schooled yourself to think along the lines, and in the grooves that those who rob you would desire you to think.
James Connolly
#14. Heckling is an act of cowardice. If you want to speak, get up in front of the microphone and speak, don't sit in the dark hiding. It's easy to hide and shout and waste people's time.
Billy Connolly
#15. My advice to you, if you want to lose a bit of weight: don't eat anything that comes in a bucket. Buckets are the kitchen utensils of the farmyard.
Billy Connolly
#16. If 'why' was the first and last question, then 'because I was curious to see what would happen' was the first and last answer. A version of it had been spoken to God Himself in the Garden of Eden, and it was destined to be the reason for the end of things at the hands of man.
John Connolly
#18. Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.
Cyril Connolly
#19. 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
#21. 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
#22. For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
Cyril Connolly
#23. Both my parents died on the young side. My father was 45, and my mother was 61, so cancer's affected me in a big way.
Kevin Connolly
#24. 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
#25. On more than one occasion David, in his urge to explore the darker corners of the bookshelves, had found himself wearing strands of spider silk in his face and hair, causing the web's creator to scuttle into a corner and crouch balefully, lost in thoughts of arachnoid revenge.
John Connolly
#26. Regrets, Blacksmith, make poor currency. You can't but back with them what you most desire.
John Connolly
#28. As an actor, there are so many different people to hide behind.
Kevin Connolly
#29. It's a natural consequence of the capacity of a bookstore or library to contain entire worlds, whole universes, and all contained between the covers of books. In that sense, every library or bookstore is practically infinite.
John Connolly
#30. Every individual spends a lifetime trying to disprove Copernicus by placing him- or herself at the heart of existence, but a small core of diehards manages to turn it into an art.
John Connolly
#31. I was a child who loved books, and I am an adult who is the product of books.
John Connolly
#32. All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
Cyril Connolly
#34. Everyone has dated or been with a person who is obsessed with their work, and it's immensely frustrating.
Kristen Connolly
#35. Why is there always one bloke in these boy bands who looks like he came to fix the boiler and somehow got bullied into joining the group?
John Connolly
#36. As I get older I tend to rail against the world more and more.
John Connolly
#37. 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
#38. Cheap work is seldom, if ever, valuable. Usually, it's just cheap.
Jim Connolly
#39. We pay for vice by the knowledge that we are wicked; we pay for pleasure when we find out too late that we are nothing.
Cyril Connolly
#40. I met Hamlet at a number 48B bus stop," said Mr. Gedeon. "He'd been there for some time, poor chap. At least eight buses had passed him by, and he hadn't taken any of them. It's to be expected, I suppose. It's in his nature.
John Connolly
#41. I'm actually pale blue: it takes me a week of sunbathing to turn white.
Billy Connolly
#42. I have been made redundant before and it is a terrible blow; redundant is a rotten word because it makes you think you are useless.
Billy Connolly
#44. Prepare for the worst and you won't be disappointed.
John Connolly
#45. Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
Cyril Connolly
#46. In the old house, the past hung in the air like motes of dust waiting to be illuminated by the sharp rays of memory
John Connolly
#47. When she was taken from me it was like the death of a world, an infinite number of futures coming to an end.
John Connolly
#48. 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
#49. I'd been hurt, and in response I had acted violently, destroying a little of myself each time I did so.
John Connolly
#50. We're the world's leading producer of serial killers. It's a sign of sickness, is what it is. We're sick and weak and these killers are like a cancer inside us: the faster we grow, the quicker they multiply.
John Connolly
#51. Irish tory employers hid[e] their sweatshops behind orange flags, and Irish home rule landlords us[e] the green sunburst of Erin to cloak their rack-renting in the festering slums of our Irish towns.
James Connolly
#52. David could tell, by looking at her face as she read, whether or not the story contained in the book was living inside her, and she in it, and he would recall again all that she had told him about stories and tales and the power that they wield over us, and that we in turn wield over them.
John Connolly
#53. 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
#54. Being clever is not just about how much you know, but about knowing that you really don't know very much at all.
John Connolly
#55. We are not meant to know the time or the nature of our deaths (for all of us secretly hope that we may be immortal).
John Connolly
#56. He thought of the old commonplace about how giving up vices didn't make you live longer, but just made it feel as though you were living longer.
John Connolly
#57. Tennis can be a grind and there's always the danger of going stale if you think about it too much. You can get embittered if you train too hard and have nothing else on your mind. You have to be able to relax between matches and between tournaments.
Maureen Connolly
#58. although his physician had advised him not to be overly concerned about forgetting facts and names, and he should begin to worry only if he stopped noticing that he couldn't remember them - if, in essence, he forgot that he was forgetting.
John Connolly
#59. The door, when I tried it, was locked, but a locked door is more the promise of security than security itself.
John Connolly
#60. Carelessness is not fatal to journalism, nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once; a journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow.
Cyril Connolly
#61. Mum," said Christopher. "It's a demon. I don't think a poker will hurt it."
"It will where I'm going to put it," said Mrs. Mayer.
John Connolly
#62. Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.
Cyril Connolly
#63. 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
#64. Meerlust Rubicon from South Africa, a suitably wintry red.
John Connolly
#65. For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.
John Connolly
#66. Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.
Cyril Connolly
#68. Art is made by the alone for the alone ... The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication ...
Cyril Connolly
#69. I could not live without seasons, for in seasons are reflected in the rhythms of our existence: of birth and maturity, or decline and decay, yet always with the promise of renewal for those who remain.
John Connolly
#70. Being scared isn't the problem. It's not running away that's the hard part.
John Connolly
#71. When I started in homicide, the Dead Sea was just sick.
John Connolly
#72. I'm a ghost," said the small figure, then added, a little uncertainly, "Boo?
John Connolly
#73. The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
Cyril Connolly
#74. Most of the bad situations I've encountered began with the best of intentions.
John Connolly
#75. What is good for you creatively is usually bad commercially. You thrive financially by sticking to a series and not fiddling about too much. You do yourself harm by moving away from the series and the genre. By trying things not based in that particular mode of writing, you will just lose readers.
John Connolly
#76. The day passed, a poor, sluggish thing that departed almost gratefully as night took its place.
John Connolly
#77. 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
#78. Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.
Cyril Connolly
#79. Parker felt, not for the first time, as though he had wandered into a ghost story.
John Connolly
#80. Dogs were generally incompatible with melancholy.
John Connolly
#81. Maybe this is common to all those who lose someone whom they have loved deeply. Making contact with another potential partner, another lover, becomes an act of reconstruction, a building not only of a relationship but also of oneself.
John Connolly
#82. War merely gives people an excuse to indulge themselves further, to murder with impunity.
John Connolly
#83. I can always guarantee that the Irish Citizen Army will fight but I cannot guarantee that it will be on time
James Connolly
#85. Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.
Cyril Connolly
#86. I think we've established that her son is crazy, and crazy cancels out clever every time.
John Connolly
#87. does." Not enough of it to avoid dating a jackass like Jeff, but solving other people's problems was often easier than taking care of your own. I considered
John Connolly
#88. It takes time to get used to a strange house, especially one as old as this. Even I sometimes find myself looking over my shoulder when I'm alone in it. It's the way of such places, isn't it? They wear their history heavily.
John Connolly
#89. If he has a weakness, it's that he's a moral being. Where possible, he'll do the right thing, the just thing, and if he does wrong he'll bear the guilt of it.
John Connolly
#90. Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.
Cyril Connolly
#91. M is for Marx
And clashing of classes
And movement of masses
And massing of asses.
Cyril Connolly
#92. Like many lazy people, once I started work I could not stop; perhaps that is why we avoid it.
Cyril Connolly
#94. It's my mind, and I reserve the right to change it as often as I like.
Billy Connolly
#95. Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.
Cyril Connolly
#96. But there were some who went with her willingly, for there are other women who dream of lying with wolves.
John Connolly
#97. A best-seller is the golden touch of mediocre talent.
Cyril Connolly
#98. 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
#99. I've been a poser for f
ing years. I say, pose your arse off. You know, have a laugh.
Billy Connolly
#100. Never trust a man who, when left alone in a room with a tea cozy, doesn't try it on.
Billy Connolly
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