Cyril Connolly Quotes - Page 2

While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

English Law: where there are two alternatives: one intelligent, one stupid; one attractive, one vulgar; one noble, one ape-like; one serious and sincere, one undignified and false; one far-sighted, one short; EVERYBODY will INVARIABLY choose the latter.

Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.

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.

Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.

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

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.

Failure on the other hand is infectious. The world is full of charming failures (for all charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others) and unless the writer is quite ruthless with these amiable footlers, they will drag him down with them.

The books I haven't written are better than the books other people have.

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.

A stone lies in a river; a piece of wood is jammed against it; dead leaves, drifting logs, and branches caked with mud collect; weeds settle there, and soon birds have made a nest and are feeding their young among the blossoming water plants. Then the river rises and the earth is washed away. The birds depart, the flowers wither, the branches are dislodged and drift downward; no trace is left of the floating island but a stone submerged by the water; - such is our personality.

In the sex-war, thoughtlessness is a weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female. Both are reciprocally generated, but a woman's desire for revenge outlasts all other emotion. Yet when every unkind word about women has been said, we have still to admit, with Byron, that they are nicer than men. They are more devoted, more unselfish and more emotionally sincere. When the long fuse of cruelty, deceit and revenge is set alight, it is male thoughtlessness which has fired it.

There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.

There are only three things which make life worth living: to be writing a tolerably good book, to be in a dinner party of six, and to be traveling south with someone whom your conscience permits you to love.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.

In a perfect union the man and woman are like a strung bow. Who is to say whether the string bends the bow, or the bow tightens the string?

The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.

There is no suicide for which all society is not responsible.

In my religion, there would be no exclusive doctrine; all would be love, poetry, and doubt.

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

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

No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.

Industrial society seems likely to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems