Cyril Connolly Quotes

94 Sourced Quotes

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

Cyril Connolly
There are about forty-nine masochists to one sadist.

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

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

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

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

Cyril Connolly
Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

Cyril Connolly
Mr. Wilson does not write as one who believes in a particular religion but rather as an intellectual who is being forced more and more into accepting religion as the only solution to the problem of the Outsider. In other words, the anxiety and uneasiness, the sheer horror of being oneself in the modern world is not to be cured by reason or even of study of philosophies which set out to explain them, like Existentialism; the unpleasant symptoms have to be lived through, leading to the worst, in order that the final, mystical experience may be attained. The Outsider has it within him to become a saint. Yet, though Mr. Wilson is drawn to religion, and all his arrows point that way, he never departs from his standards of intellectual analysis.

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

Cyril Connolly
The boredom of Sunday afternoon, which drove de Quincey to drink laudanum, also gave birth to surrealism: hours propitious for making bombs.

Cyril Connolly
We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.

Cyril Connolly
I greet you, my educated fellow bourgeois, whose interests and whose doubts I share.

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

Cyril Connolly
He reduced everything to politics; he was also unalterably of the Left. His line may have been unpopular or unfashionable, but he followed it unhesitatingly; in fact it was an obsession. He could not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.

Cyril Connolly
The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Cyril Connolly
Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signaling to be let out.

Cyril Connolly
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."

Cyril Connolly
The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Cyril Connolly
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
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
When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.

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

Cyril Connolly