Top 100 Cyril Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Verily I say unto you," Stuart said, looking Cyril straight in the eye and folding his arms, "that if you do not mind your sister Millie, you will be smitten both hip and thigh
Martha Finley
#4. Cyril, church warden and lead tenor in the choir, lives with mother, banned from unsupervised contact with schoolchildren; Harold, drunk dentist, early retirement, pretty thatched cottage off the Bodmin road, one son in rehab, wife in the bin.
John Le Carre
#5. What would Jeeves do that for?"
"It struck me as rummy, too." ...
"I mean to say, it's nothing to Jeeves what sort of a face you have!"
"No!" said Cyril. He spoke a little coldly, I fancied. I don't know why. "Well, I'll be popping. Toodle-oo!
P.G. Wodehouse
#6. In the year 415, the woman scientist Hypatia, head of the legendary Alexandria library, was beaten to death by Christian monks who considered her a pagan. The leader of the monks, Cyril, was canonized a saint.
James A. Haught
#7. British physician Cyril Donnison in 1938 in Civilization and Disease, hypertension was already among the best-documented examples of a disease that seemed specific to Western societies and the more affluent social classes elsewhere.
Gary Taubes
#8. Meet me in the courtyard in half an hour, then," said Will. "I'll wake Cyril. And be prepared to swoon at my finery.
Cassandra Clare
#9. 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.
p.20
Nina Sankovitch
#10. Back in the 1950s and '60s, J. M. Barrie's 'Peter Pan' - starring Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard - was regularly aired on network television during the Christmas season. I must have seen it four or five times and remember, in particular, Ritchard's gloriously camp interpretation of Captain Hook.
Michael Dirda
#11. By being silent he can do more than those who chatter. For he is in tune with the commandments as a harp is with its strings.
Cyril Charles Richardson
#12. Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.
Cyril Connolly
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
Cyril Connolly
#16. 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
#17. The conditions of our knowledge of the native religion of early Rome may perhaps be best illustrated by a parallel from Roman archaeology.
Cyril Bailey
#18. Parliament is the longest running farce in the West End.
Cyril Smith
#19. The wider our contemplation of creation, the grander is our conception of God.
Cyril Of Jerusalem
#20. All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
Cyril Connolly
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. In the person of Christ a man has not become God; God has become man.
Cyril Of Jerusalem
#24. Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
Cyril Connolly
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.
Cyril Connolly
#29. 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
#30. Religion promotes the divine discontent within oneself, so that one tries to make oneself a better person and draw oneself closer to God.
Cyril Cusack
#31. Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.
Cyril Connolly
#32. Why is the Rockefeller Commission so Single-Minded About a Lone Assassin in the Kennedy Case?,
Cyril Wecht
#33. Art is made by the alone for the alone ... The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication ...
Cyril Connolly
#34. Indeed the mystery of Christ runs the risk of being disbelieved precisely because it is so incredibly wonderful
Cyril Of Alexandria
#35. What does it mean to write a story of your own life in your head? We all do that whether we are writers or not. We all have a story about who we are: what gender we are, what experiences we have . . . all sorts of stories and narratives we allow ourselves to believe in and create as we go along.
Cyril Wong
#36. The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
Cyril Connolly
#37. 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
#38. Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.
Cyril Connolly
#39. In my younger years my dedication may have expressed itself egotistically.
Cyril Cusack
#40. Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.
Cyril Connolly
#41. Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.
Cyril Connolly
#42. Acting is the most brotherly and sisterly profession in the world.
Cyril Cusack
#43. M is for Marx
And clashing of classes
And movement of masses
And massing of asses.
Cyril Connolly
#44. Like many lazy people, once I started work I could not stop; perhaps that is why we avoid it.
Cyril Connolly
#45. Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.
Cyril Connolly
#46. A best-seller is the golden touch of mediocre talent.
Cyril Connolly
#47. 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
#48. You see the clouds in the sky? I made that with Vapr!
Cyril Takayama
#49. I have been on my own all my life except during those touring days.
Cyril Cusack
#50. I have tried to explore the little talent I have for writing.
Cyril Cusack
#51. So long as large armies go to battle, so long will the air arm remain their spearhead.
Cyril Falls
#52. Surely we are all mad people, and they
Whom we think are, are not;
Cyril Tourneur
#53. Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.
Cyril Connolly
#54. We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion.
Cyril Connolly
#55. Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.
Cyril Connolly
#56. In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.
Cyril Connolly
#57. There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
Cyril Connolly
#59. 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
#60. If you asked me for my New Year Resolution, it would be to find out who I am.
Cyril Cusack
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient; afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.
Cyril Connolly
#64. Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.
Cyril Connolly
#65. Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.
Cyril Connolly
#66. 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
#67. The technology [semiconductors] which has transformed practical existence is largely an application of what was discovered by these allegedly irresponsible [natural] philosophers.
Cyril Norman Hinshelwood
#68. The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.
Cyril Connolly
#69. Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.
Cyril Connolly
#70. It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
Cyril Connolly
#71. We fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noises.
Cyril Connolly
#72. 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
#74. 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
#75. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
Cyril Connolly
#77. 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
#78. There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.
Cyril Connolly
#79. 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
#80. 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
#82. Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment.
Cyril Connolly
#83. Perhaps the story of the human race is best understood as a journey through particularly hazardous terrain, in the dark, in a not very well-serviced vehicle, with a succession of drivers of varying competence, in assorted states of inebreiation
Cyril Aydon
#84. 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
#85. Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.
Cyril Connolly
#86. 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
#87. A woman's desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.
Cyril Connolly
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.
Cyril Connolly
#91. Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
Cyril Connolly
#92. The dread of lonliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
Cyril Connolly
#93. Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.
Cyril Connolly
#94. 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
#95. Leadership is particularly necessary to ensure ready acceptance of the unfamiliar and that which is contrary to tradition.
Cyril Falls
#96. 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
#97. An aesthetic movement with a revolutionary dynamism and no popular appeal should proceed quite otherwise than by public scandal, publicity stunt, noisy expulsion and excommunication.
Cyril Connolly
#98. I am a nationalist ... my native soil is the theatre.
Cyril Cusack
#99. 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
#100. Our memories are card-indexes consulted and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
Cyril Connolly
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
