Cyril Connolly Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.

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

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

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

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

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

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life.

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

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.

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

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

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

Friendships that last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from them.

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

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

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.

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