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
As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Publishers, Publishing, Books
The hunt for young authors who, while maintaining a prestige value (with a r.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Authors & Writing
Promise is the capacity for letting people down.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Potential
Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph—green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Epitaphs
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
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
Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Memory, Disorder
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
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 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
We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Love
The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Marriage, Loneliness
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Talent, Praise
The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Diet, Weight, Food
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, Existence, Success
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
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
All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Appreciation, Ego, Charm, Change
The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Art
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
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 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: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers
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
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 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
The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Solitude
There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Gossip, Suicide
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
It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Country
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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