Cyril Connolly Quotes:

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

source: - New Statesman 25 Feb. 1933

Topics: Inspirational, Respect, Writing, Writing For Yourself, Self Empowerment

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

source: - Unquiet Grave (1944) pt. 2

Topics: Health, Character, Men

Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.

Topics: Lying, Autumn, Sun, Fallen Leaves, Daffodil

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

Topics: Alive, Literature

All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.

source: - Enemies of Promise (1938) ch. 16

Topics: Appreciation, People, Ego, Dependence On Others, Appreciation In Relationships

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

Topics: Loss, Purpose, Way, Inspirational Weight, Inspirational Weight Loss

Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.

source: - "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

Topics: Children, Fear, Hate, Hate And Fear, No Hate

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

source: - "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

Topics: Morning, Men, Cities, Morning Walk, City Life

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

source: - The Unquiet Grave Pt II

Topics: Funny, Death, Fear

The books I haven't written are better than the books other people have.

Topics: Book, People, Career Success

The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.

Topics: Life, Success, Secret, Wave Of Life, Perfect Harmony

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

Topics: Life, Fear, Literature, Butchers, Irrational Fear

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

Topics: Inspirational, Nice, Writing, Always Be Nice, Young And Old

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

Topics: Memories, Cards, Literature, Our Memories

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

Topics: Art, Writing, Literature, Newspaper Reporters, Art Of Writing

For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?

Topics: Freedom, Liberty, Action

If one is too lazy to think, too vain to do a thing badly, too cowardly to admit it, one will never attain wisdom.

Topics: Wisdom, Thinking, Lazy

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

Topics: Happiness, Passion, Justice, Want To Be Happy

It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.

Topics: Country, Nature, Book

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.

Topics: Animal, Thinking, Misery, Clear Thinking

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.

Topics: Memories, Wine, Sunshine, Salt Water, Saturated

Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.

Topics: Reality, History, Drug, Dangerous Drugs, Unendurable

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.

Topics: Revolutionary, Surrealism, Aesthetic, Excommunication, Expulsion

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.

Topics: Morning, Lying, Night, Prime Of Life, Pascal

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

Topics: Sex, War, Males, Thoughtlessness, Vindictiveness

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life.

Topics: Literature, Salad, Garlic, Vulgarity Is

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.

Topics: Dream, Selfish, Night

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

Topics: Opinion

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

source: - Enemies of Promise (1938) ch. 14

Topics: Art, Enemy, Atheism, Good Art, Prams

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

source: - The Unquiet Grave Pt I

Topics: Motivational, Disappointment, Loss

We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.

Topics: Happiness, Tyranny, Egotism

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

Topics: Self, Jail, Dungeons

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

source: - Enemies of Promise ch. 13 (1938)

Topics: Sarcastic, Sarcasm, Intelligence

Flaubert spoke true: to succeed a great artist must have both character and fanaticism and few in this country are willing to pay the price. Our writers have either no personality and therefore no style or a false personality and therefore a bad style; they mistake prejudice for energy and accept the sensation of material well-being as a system of thought.

source: - "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

Topics: Country, Mistake, Character

When in doubt, choose greatness.

Topics: Greatness, Doubt, When In Doubt

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

source: - David Pryce-Jones, Cyril Connolly (1983). “Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir”, HarperCollins

Topics: Sweet, Past, Smell

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.

source: - Cyril Connolly, Peter Quennell (1984). “The selected essays of Cyril Connolly”

Topics: Tasks, Literature, Produce

Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.

Topics: Believe, Judgement, Atheism

Only by avoiding the beginning of things can we escape their end.

Topics: Ends, Avoiding

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.

Topics: Infidelity, Age, Causes, Infallible

There is no suicide for which all society is not responsible.

Topics: Suicide, Responsible

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.

Topics: Civilization, Luxury, Goal, Manure, Decadence

There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear is lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, our popularity, our vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may be able to cease from hating... Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate; a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.

source: - "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

Topics: Dream, Children, Hate, Lurking, No Hate

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.

source: - "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

Topics: Weed, Lying, Flower, Submerged

In the sex-war, thoughtlessness is a weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female. Both are reciprocally generated, but a woman's desire for revenge outlasts all other emotion. Yet when every unkind word about women has been said, we have still to admit, with Byron, that they are nicer than men. They are more devoted, more unselfish and more emotionally sincere. When the long fuse of cruelty, deceit and revenge is set alight, it is male thoughtlessness which has fired it.

Topics: Sex, Revenge, War, Thoughtlessness, Byron

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.

Topics: Science, Artist, Technology

Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.

source: - David Pryce-Jones, Cyril Connolly (1984). “Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir”

Topics: Names, Literature, Infinite, Coarse

The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.

Topics: Passion, Men, Slave

Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.

source: - "Cyril Connolly: journal and memoir".

Topics: Men, Literature, Fats, Thin Man, Lisp

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

source: - "Phil Spector: What I've Learned", www.esquire.com. January 29, 2007.

Topics: Love, Dream, Lonely, So Lonely

Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.

source: - "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

Topics: Sadness, Reality, Wind, Keel

Promise is the capacity for letting people down.

source: - Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.260, University of Chicago Press

Topics: People, Promise, Capacity

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.

Topics: Believe, People, Given, Greatest Poetry

No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.

Topics: Passion, Past, Serenity, Glare

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

source: - David Pryce-Jones, Cyril Connolly (1983). “Cyril Connolly: journal and memoir”, HarperCollins

Topics: Mind, Quality, Literature

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

source: - "The Unquiet Grave" by Cyril Connolly, (Part 2), 1951.

Topics: Life, Beautiful, Art, Intoxication

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

Topics: Stress, Environmental, Entering, Environmental Problems

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.

source: - Cyril Connolly (1960). “Enemies of promise and other essays: an autobiography of ideas”

Topics: Pain, Grief, Doe

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.

source: - David Pryce-Jones, Cyril Connolly (1983). “Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir”, HarperCollins

Topics: Stupid, Intelligent, Law, English Law

Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.

source: - Cyril Connolly (1960). “Enemies of promise and other essays: an autobiography of ideas”

Topics: Education, Disappointment, School, Eton, Self Conscious

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?

Topics: Men, Perfect, Unions

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. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.

source: - "The Unquiet Grave" by Cyril Connolly, (Part 2), 1951.

Topics: Country, Nice, Lying, Matisse, Overlooking

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

Topics: Class, Delirium Tremens, Apathy, Middle Class, Slums

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.

Topics: Christian, Atheism, Poison, Paralysis

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.

Topics: Funny, Beauty, Beautiful

The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.

source: - "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

Topics: Friendship, Respect, Lasts, Dignity And Respect

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

source: - "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

Topics: Love, Greed, Comfort, Greediness

A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.

Topics: Hands, Lazy, Laziness, Second Rate

In my religion, there would be no exclusive doctrine; all would be love, poetry, and doubt.

source: - "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1945.

Topics: Love, Doubt, Doctrine, Love Poetry

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.

source: - Cyril Connolly (1960). “Enemies of promise and other essays: an autobiography of ideas”

Topics: Appreciation, Hands, People, Appreciation Of Others

There are only three things which make life worth living: to be writing a tolerably good book, to be in a dinner party of six, and to be traveling south with someone whom your conscience permits you to love.

Topics: Party, Book, Writing

From now on - specialize; never again make any concession to the ninety-nine percent of you which is like everyon else at the expense of the one percent which is unique.

Topics: Unique, Ninety Nine, Advice

How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?

Topics: Book, Writing, Paint, Renoir

No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.

source: - "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

Topics: Made, Brothels, Wretched

Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.

Topics: Marriage, Two, People

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

Topics: Growing Up, Moving, Son, Railway, Railway Station

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.

Topics: Nature, Ideas, Gains, Communion With Nature

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.

source: - "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

Topics: Truth, Rivers, Arms, Splitting Up

The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.

Topics: Civilization, Atheism, Literature, Uncivilized

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

source: - Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.135, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Responsibility, World, Tire

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.

Topics: Hurt, Pain, Hate, Avoidance, Two Lovers

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

Topics: Small Numbers, Civilization, People

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

source: - David Pryce-Jones, Cyril Connolly (1984). “Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir”

Topics: Art, Class, Leisure

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.

source: - The Unquiet Grave Pt II

Topics: Mistake, Reality, Interesting

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.

Topics: Dream, Waste, Understood

Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.

Topics: Failure, Bitterness, Overrated

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

Topics: Dating, Suffering, Encounters, Promiscuous

Sheep with a nasty side.

Topics: Sheep, Insulting, Sides

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

source: - "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

Topics: Water, Tranquility, Repose

Dining out is a vice, a dissipation of spirit punished by remorse. We eat, drink, and talk a little too much, abuse all our friends, belch out our literary preferences and are egged on by accomplices in the audience to acts of mental exhibitionism. Such evenings cannot fail to diminish those who take part in them. They end on Monkey Hill.

Topics: Food, Cooking, Abuse, Dining Out, Dissipation

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.

source: - David Pryce-Jones, Cyril Connolly (1984). “Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir”

Topics: Love, Marriage, Parent, Incompatibility

Happiness lies in the fulfillment of the spirit through the body.

Topics: Lying, Body, Spirit

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

Topics: Life, Mazes, Walks, Wrong Turn

A mutually fulfilled sexual union between two people is the rarest sensation which life can provide. But it is not quite real. It stops when the telephone rings. Such a passion can be kept at its early strength only by adding to it either more and more unhappiness (jealousy, separation, doubt, renunciation), or more and more artificiality (drink, technique, stage-illusions). Whoever has missed this has never lived, who lives for it alone is but partly alive.

Topics: Real, Passion, Two, Artificiality

M is for Marx And clashing of classes And movement of masses And massing of asses.

Topics: Class, Movement, Ass

Youth is a period of missed opportunities.

Topics: Opportunity, Youth, Missed Opportunity

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.

Topics: Beach, Art, Genius, Undertow

The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.

Topics: Communication, Survival, Society, American Language

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.

source: - "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

Topics: Dream, Selfish, Night, Scabs, Vacuous

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

source: - Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.136, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Love Is, Essentials, Elation

The detective story itself is in a dilemma. It is a vein which is in danger of being worked out, the demand is constant, the powers of supply variable, and the reader, with each one he absorbs, grows a little more sophisticated and harder to please, while the novelist, after each one he writes, becomes a little more exhausted.

Topics: Writing, Novelists, Stories, Detective Fiction

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.

source: - "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

Topics: Running, Reality, Wind, Keel

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

Topics: Able, Teach, Headmistress

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

Topics: Inspirational, Self, Optimism, Self Pity

A great writer created a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

source: - 1938 Enemies of Promise, ch.1.

Topics: Writing, Watches, World, Filing

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

Topics: Emotion, Reason, Violent

The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.

source: - David Pryce-Jones, Cyril Connolly (1983). “Cyril Connolly: journal and memoir”, HarperCollins

Topics: Food, Solitude, Vices, Food Safety

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.

Topics: Book, Writing, Air, Fortnight

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

source: - Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.17, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Writing, Style, Language

There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.

Topics: God, Atheism, Pessimistic

Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.

Topics: Dresses, Belief, Crabs, Seaweed

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

Topics: Suicide, Creative, Despair

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

Topics: Women, Wife, Lovers, Ex Wife

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

source: - "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

Topics: Lasts, Firsts, Miserable, Orpheus

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

source: - Cyril Connolly (1946). “The Condemned Playground”

Topics: Peace, War, Morbid, Surplus

If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given us to be denied at every turn, if our nature is always wrong and wicked, how ineffectual we are; like fishes not meant to swim.

Topics: Swim, Wicked, Atheism

The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.

Topics: Art, Fall, Dark

Most of the beauty of women evaporates when they achieve domestic happiness at the price of their independence.

Topics: Marriage, Independence, Achieve, Women Beauty

Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph-green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.

source: - David Pryce-Jones, Cyril Connolly (1983). “Cyril Connolly: journal and memoir”, HarperCollins

Topics: Tree, Green, Epitaph, Dead Trees, Green Leaves

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."

source: - Cyril Connolly (1953). “Ideas and Places”, London, Weidenfeld

Topics: Two, People, Mind, Fastidious, Things That Matter

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

source: - Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.3, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Writing, Dark, Purple

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

Topics: Arguing, Poet, Modern, Snarling, Modern Poetry

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

Topics: Art, Blow, Noses, Handkerchiefs

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.

source: - 1944 The Unquiet Grave, pt.2.

Topics: War, World, Able

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.

Topics: Eye, Facts, Tomorrow, Carelessness

Young writers if they are to mature require a period of between three and seven years in which to live down their promise. Promise is like the mediaeval hangman who after settling the noose, pushed his victim off the platform and jumped on his back, his weight acting a drop while his jockeying arms prevented the unfortunate from loosening the rope. When he judged him dead he dropped to the ground.

source: - Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.109, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Writing, Years, Promise, Young Writers, Hangman

The lesson one can learn from Firbank is that of inconsequence. There is the vein which he tapped and which has not yet been fully exploited.

source: - Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.36, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Veins, Lessons

The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.

source: - Cyril Connolly (1960). “Enemies of promise and other essays: an autobiography of ideas”

Topics: Stupid, Intelligent, Thinking

In the dream of approaching forty I saw myself as about to die and realized that I was no longer myself, but a creature inhabited entirely by parasites, as a caterpillar is occupied by the grubs of the ichneumon fly. Gin, whisky, sloth, fear, guilt, tobacco, had made themselves my inquilines; alcohol sloshed about within, while tendrils of melon and vine grew out of ears and nostrils; my mind was a worn gramophone record, my true self was such a ruin as to seem non-existent, and all this had happened in the last three years.

Topics: Dream, Years, Self, Melons

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.

Topics: Stupid, Power, Bored

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.

Topics: Rivers, Sitting, Tipping, Barges, Anglers

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

Topics: Emotional, Feelings, Unbearable

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.

source: - Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.38, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Pain, Golden Moments, Pleasure

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.

source: - Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.105, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Mistake, Literature, Matter, Expatriates

The artist secretes nostalgia around life.

Topics: Artist, Nostalgia

In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.

Topics: Together, Drink, Believer

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

source: - Cyril Connolly (1975). “The evening colonnade”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

Topics: Hate, Long, Literature, Long Way

In America every woman has her set of girl-friends; some are cousins, the rest are gained at school. These form a permanent committee who sit on each other's affairs, who come out together, marry and divorce together, and who end as those groups of bustling, heartless well-informed club-women who govern society. Against them the Couple of Ehepaar is helpless and Man in their eyes but a biological interlude.

Topics: Friendship, Girl, Cousin, Girl Friend

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

Topics: Art, Past, 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.

source: - Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.107, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Running, Taken, Air

We may assume that we keep people waiting symbolically because we do not wish to see them and that our anxiety is due not to being late, but to having to see them at all.

Topics: People, Waiting, Anxiety, Punctual

Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.

source: - Cyril Connolly (1975). “The evening colonnade”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

Topics: Revenge, Intelligence, Intellectual

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.

source: - Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.114, University of Chicago Press

Topics: Travel, Past, Years

Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.

Topics: Nature, Men, Literature, Family Quarrel

There is immunity in reading, immunity in formal society, in office routine, in the company of old friends and in the giving of officious help to strangers, but there is no sanctuary in one bed from the memory of another. The past with its anguish will break through every defense-line of custom and habit; we must sleep and therefore we must dream.

Topics: Dream, Memories, Grief

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.

Topics: Fall, Men, Eden, Fall Of Man, Expulsion

It is a consolation of human life that the sick forget what it is like to feel well, or the miserable to be happy.

Topics: Sick, Misery, Forget

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

source: - David Pryce-Jones, Cyril Connolly (1984). “Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir”

Topics: Problem, Should, Seems

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.

Topics: Birthday, Wisdom, Book, 30th Birthday

We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.

Topics: Love

That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.

Topics: New York, Men, Economic, Rockefeller Center, Stonehenge

When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?

Topics: Men, Years, Garbage Cans, Life Span, Seventies

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

Topics: Faithful, Literature, Loyal

What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?

Topics: Wine, Sun, Taught

It is significant comment on the victory of science over magic that were someone to say ‘if I put this pill in your beer it will explode,’ we might believe them; but were they to cry ‘if I pronounce this spell over your beer it will go flat,’ we should remain incredulous and Paracelsus, the Alchemists, Aleister Crowley and all the Magi have lived in vain. Yet when I read science I turn magical; when I study magic, scientific.

Topics: Believe, Beer, Over You

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.

Topics: Beach, Children, Home, Luster, Seaweed

Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.

Topics: Passion, Ignorance, Darkness, Passion And Purity, Infatuated

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

Topics: Peeking, Lamps, Way