Cyril Connolly Quotes

Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.

Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph-green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.

He [George Orwell] would not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.

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

Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.

We may assume that we keep people waiting symbolically because we do not wish to see them and that our anxiety is due not to being late, but to having to see them at all.

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

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

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

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.

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

While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

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

Except for poverty, incompatibility, opposition of parents, absence of love on one side and of desire to marry on both, nothing stands in the way of our happy union.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.

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

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

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

Industrial society seems likely to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems

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

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

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.

It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.

Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.

If one is too lazy to think, too vain to do a thing badly, too cowardly to admit it, one will never attain wisdom.

Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.

There is no suicide for which all society is not responsible.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.

The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.

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.

There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear is lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, our popularity, our vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may be able to cease from hating... Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate; a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.

In the sex-war, thoughtlessness is a weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female. Both are reciprocally generated, but a woman's desire for revenge outlasts all other emotion. Yet when every unkind word about women has been said, we have still to admit, with Byron, that they are nicer than men. They are more devoted, more unselfish and more emotionally sincere. When the long fuse of cruelty, deceit and revenge is set alight, it is male thoughtlessness which has fired it.

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

It is the fear of middle-age in the young, of old-age in the middle-aged, which is the prime cause of infidelity, that infallible rejuvenator.

From now on - specialize; never again make any concession to the ninety-nine percent of you which is like everyon else at the expense of the one percent which is unique.

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.

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

Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.

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

Youth is a period of missed opportunities.

Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment.

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

No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.

Two weeks before his death, a friend asked him half jokingly if he had discovered any meaning in life. "Yes," he replied, "there is a meaning; at least, for me, there is one thing that matters - to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people."

That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.

Flaubert spoke true: to succeed a great artist must have both character and fanaticism and few in this country are willing to pay the price. Our writers have either no personality and therefore no style or a false personality and therefore a bad style; they mistake prejudice for energy and accept the sensation of material well-being as a system of thought.

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

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

The books I haven't written are better than the books other people have.