Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Sin
The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Past, The Past
We are all serving a self-sentence in the dungeon of self.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Self-Discovery, Prison
Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Greed, Gratitude, Blessings, Appreciation
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
There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Suicide, Gossip
The person who is master of their passions is reason’s slave.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Reason
Nothing dates like hate and in literature a little of it goes a very long way.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Hate
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: Friendship, Action
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
The true index of a man’s character is the health of his wife.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Marriage, Wives
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Journalists, Authors & Writing, Literature, Journalism
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: Women, Friends and Friendship, Government
The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Food, Diet, Weight
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
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
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
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
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
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: Grieving, Grief
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
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: Corruption, Actors, Luxury
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
Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Hate
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
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
Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Youth
Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Disorder, Memory
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
Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Apathy, Crime
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- L. P. Hartley British Writer, Critic
- J. R. R. Tolkien British Philologist, Writer
- Pico Iyer British-born Essayist, Novelist of Indian Origin
- Robert Hugh Benson English Author, Clergyman
- John Michell English Esotericist, New Age Writer
- Maurice Baring British Author
- Philip Pullman English Children’s Author, Dramatist
- Kingsley Amis English Novelist, Poet
- Ian McEwan (b.1948) British Novelist, Short-story Writer
- Hanif Kureishi British Novelist, Screenwriter
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