Cyril Connolly Quotes:
The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
Cyril Connolly
Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.
Cyril Connolly
The dread of lonliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
Cyril Connolly
Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life.
Cyril Connolly
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.
Cyril Connolly
The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
Cyril Connolly
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
Cyril Connolly
Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
Cyril Connolly
The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.
Cyril Connolly
For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
Cyril Connolly
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.
Cyril Connolly
Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.
Cyril Connolly
It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.
Cyril Connolly
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
Cyril Connolly
A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.
Cyril Connolly
We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.
Cyril Connolly
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.
Cyril Connolly
In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.
Cyril Connolly
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.
Cyril Connolly
No taste is so acquired as that for someone else’s quality of mind.
Cyril Connolly
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.
Cyril Connolly
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
Cyril Connolly