Cyril Connolly Quotes

94 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Cyril Connolly
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

Cyril Connolly
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques.

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

Cyril Connolly
In the eighteenth century he would have become Prime Minister before he was thirty; as it was he appeared honourably ineligible for the struggle of life.
On home

Cyril Connolly
The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication, that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

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

Cyril Connolly
It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.

Cyril Connolly
Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph – green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.

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

Cyril Connolly
Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.

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

Cyril Connolly
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
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.

Cyril Connolly
If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.

Cyril Connolly
Man axalotl here below but I ask very little. Some fragments of Pamphylides, a Choctaw blood-mask, the prose of Scaliger the Elder, a painting by Fuseli, an occasional visit to the all-in wrestling, or to my meretrix; a cook who can produce a passable 'poulet à la Khmer,' a Pong vase. Simple tastes, you will agree, and it is my simple habit to indulge them!

Cyril Connolly
A stone lies in a river; a piece of wood is jammed against it; dead leaves, drifting logs, and branches caked with mud collect; weeds settle there, and soon birds have made a nest and are feeding their young among the blossoming water plants. Then the river rises and the earth is washed away. The birds depart, the flowers wither, the branches are dislodged and drift downward; no trace is left of the floating island but a stone submerged by the water; — such is our personality.

Cyril Connolly
The refractory pupil of Socrates, Aristippus the Cyrene, who believed happiness to be the sum of particular pleasures and golden moments and not, as Epicurus, a prolonged intermediary state between ecstasy and pain.

Cyril Connolly
The artist of to-day…walks at first with his companions, till one day he falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.

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

Cyril Connolly
The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.

Cyril Connolly
I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.

Cyril Connolly
Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.

Cyril Connolly
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.

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

Cyril Connolly
The worst vice of the solitary [man] is the worship of his food.

Cyril Connolly
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 encountered.

Cyril Connolly
Everything is a dangerous drug to me except reality, which is unendurable.

Cyril Connolly
You imply our education is of no use to you in after life. But no education is. We are not an employment agency; all we can do is to give you a grounding in the art of mixing with your fellow men, to tell you what to expect from life and give you an outward manner and inward poise, an old prescription from the eighteenth century which we call a classical education, an education which confers the infrequent virtues of good sense and good taste and the benefit of dual nationality, English and Mediterranean, and which, taking into account the difficulties of modern life, we find the philosophy best able to overcome them.

Cyril Connolly