Quotes By Cyril Connolly

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

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.

When we have ceased to love the stench of the human animal, either in others or in ourselves, then are we condemned to misery, and clear thinking can begin.

Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

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

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.

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

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.

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

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

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.

Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.

A best-seller is the golden touch of mediocre talent.

Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.

The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.

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.

The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.

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.

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

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life.

No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.

We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.

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.

Youth is a period of missed opportunities.

Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.

The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.

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