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.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Cyril Connolly
All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Change, Charm, Appreciation, Ego
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
Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Crime, Apathy
The true index of a man’s character is the health of his wife.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Marriage, Wives
Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Youth
Promise is the capacity for letting people down.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Potential
The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Art
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we learn to walk.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Perseverance, Endurance, Resolve
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
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.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Criticism, Critics
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
When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Age
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: Friends and Friendship, Government, Women
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.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: The Body
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 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
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-Pres: 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.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Civilization
I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits. It is the style of all the writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean to and more than they feel. It is the style of most artists and all humbug.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Authors & Writing
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
The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Loneliness, Marriage
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: Happiness, Acceptance
In the sex-war thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Men & Women, Men and Women
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
Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Hedonism, Courage, Self-Pity, Cowardice
Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph—green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Epitaphs
We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Love
Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Memory, Disorder
When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Conscience
A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossing with oneself, malignant and ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Insanity
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