Quotes By Cyril Connolly

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life.

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

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

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

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.

Youth is a period of missed opportunities.

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

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

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

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.