Quotes By Cyril Connolly

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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