Cyril Connolly Quotes

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

Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.

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.

Two weeks before his death, a friend asked him half jokingly if he had discovered any meaning in life. "Yes," he replied, "there is a meaning; at least, for me, there is one thing that matters - to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people."

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

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

The only happy talkers are dandies who extract pleasure from the very perishability of their material and who would not be able to tolerate the isolation of all other forms of composition; for most good talkers, when they have run down, are miserable; they know that they have betrayed themselves, that they have taken material which should have a life of its own, to dispense it in noises upon the air.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization; the factors of decadence, -- luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, -- are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.

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

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

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

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.

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

There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives.

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.

There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another... It is when we begin to hurt those whom we love that the guilt with which we are born becomes intolerable, and since all those whom we love intensely and continuously grow part of us, and since we hate ourselves in them, so we torture ourselves and them together.

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.

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.

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.

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

Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.

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

When in doubt, choose greatness.

Beautiful women must think about their beauty as capitalists think about their investments or politicians about their majorities; it is all they have to insure their places in the world.

How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?

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

The English masses are lovable: they are kind, decent, tolerant, practical and not stupid. The tragedy is that they are too many of them, and that they are aimless, having outgrown the servile functions for which they were encouraged to multiply. One day these huge crowds will have to seize power because there will be nothing else for them to do, and yet they neither demand power nor are ready to make use of it; they will learn only to be bored in a new way.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.

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.

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

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.

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.

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