Cyril Connolly Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.

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

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

Cyril Connolly
A best-seller is the golden touch of mediocre talent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cyril Connolly
There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.

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

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

Cyril Connolly
Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment.

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

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

Cyril Connolly
The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.

Cyril Connolly
Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.

Cyril Connolly
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learnt to walk.

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

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

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

Cyril Connolly
M is for Marx
And Movement of Masses
And Massing of Arses.
And Clashing of Classes.

Cyril Connolly
In the sex-war thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.

Cyril Connolly
On the work of a book reviewer:
The thankless task of drowning other people's kittens.

Cyril Connolly
He could not blow his nose without moralising on the state of the handkerchief industry.
Of George Orwell

Cyril Connolly
Peace... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.

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

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

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

Cyril Connolly