Quotes By Cyril Connolly

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A great writer creates 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

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

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.

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

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.