Cyril Vernon Connolly was an English literary critic and writer. He was the editor of the influential literary magazine Horizon and wrote Enemies of Promise, which combined literary criticism with an autobiographical exploration of why he failed to become the successful author of fiction that he had aspired to be in his youth.
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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.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Words
A great writer creates 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.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers
Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Education, School
The hunt for young authors who, while maintaining a prestige value (with a r
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Authors & Writing
The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Civilization
There is immunity in reading, immunity in formal society, in office routine, in the company of old friends and in the giving of officious help to strangers, but there is no sanctuary in one bed from the memory of another. The past with its anguish will break through every defense-line of custom and habit; we must sleep and therefore we must dream.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Grief, Grieving
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.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Wisdom
The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Food, Diet, Weight
The secret of happiness … is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm, always lucid, always willing “to be joined to the universe without being more conscious of it than an idiot,” to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Acceptance, Happiness
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Praise, Talent
Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Style
A private school has all the faults of a public school without any of its compensations.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: School
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
Topics: Harmony, Success, Existence
The true work of art is the one which the seventh wave of genius throws up the beach where the undertow of time cannot drag it back.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Art
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Authors & Writing, Self-respect, Writing
When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing
There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: God
We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life; it is because we tire of our responsibility.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Responsibility
Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph—green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Epitaphs
Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Idleness
A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he starts out, have condemned himself to second-rate thoughts, and to second-rate friends
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Talent, Laziness
Imprisoned in every fat man, a thin one is wildly signaling to be let out.
—Cyril Connolly
The friendships which last are those wherein—each friend respects the other’s dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Action, Friendship
The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Solitude
Never would it occur to a child that a sheep, a pig, a cow or a chicken was good to eat, while, like Milton’s Adam, he would eagerly make a meal off fruits, nuts, thyme, mint, peas and broad beans which penetrate further and stimulate not only the appetite but other vague and deep nostalgias. We are closer to the Vegetable Kingdom than we know; is it not for man alone that mint, thyme, sage, and rosemary exhale “crush me and eat me!”—for us that opium poppy, coffee-berry, tea-plant and vine perfect themselves? Their aim is to be absorbed by us, even if it can only be achieved by attaching themselves to roast mutton.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Vegetarianism
A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious “retreat” of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Travel
The person who is master of their passions is reason’s slave.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Reason
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
Topics: Love, Lovers
We must select the Illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Illusion
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we learn to walk.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Perseverance, Endurance, Resolve
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.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing
Promise is the capacity for letting people down.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Potential
In America every woman has her set of girl-friends; some are cousins, the rest are gained at school. These form a permanent committee who sit on each other’s affairs, who “come out” together, marry and divorce together, and who end as those groups of bustling, heartless well-informed club-women who govern society. Against them the Couple of Ehepaar is helpless and Man in their eyes but a biological interlude.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Government, Friends and Friendship, Women
Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Science
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.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Exile
The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Art
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.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Marriage
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.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Actors, Corruption, Luxury
When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Age
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
Topics: Terrorism
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