Best 155 quotes of Cyril Connolly on MyQuotes

Cyril Connolly

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    Cyril Connolly

    A great writer created 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.

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    Cyril Connolly

    A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.

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    Cyril Connolly

    A life based on reason will always require to be balanced by an occasional bout of violent and irrational emotion, for instinctual drives must be satisfied

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    Cyril Connolly

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

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    Cyril Connolly

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

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    Cyril Connolly

    A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossed with oneself, malignant and ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality.

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    Cyril Connolly

    A mutually fulfilled sexual union between two people is the rarest sensation which life can provide. But it is not quite real. It stops when the telephone rings. Such a passion can be kept at its early strength only by adding to it either more and more unhappiness (jealousy, separation, doubt, renunciation), or more and more artificiality (drink, technique, stage-illusions). Whoever has missed this has never lived, who lives for it alone is but partly alive.

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    Cyril Connolly

    An aesthetic movement with a revolutionary dynamism and no popular appeal should proceed quite otherwise than by public scandal, publicity stunt, noisy expulsion and excommunication.

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    Cyril Connolly

    An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.

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    Cyril Connolly

    Approaching forty, I had a singular dream in which I almost grasped the meaning and understood the nature of what it is that wastes in wasted time.

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    Cyril Connolly

    As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.

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    Cyril Connolly

    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.

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    Cyril Connolly

    A woman's desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.

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    Cyril Connolly

    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.

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    Cyril Connolly

    Beautiful women must think about their beauty as capitalists think about their investments or politicians about their majorities; it is all they have to insure their places in the world.

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    Cyril Connolly

    Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.

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    Cyril Connolly

    Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom.

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    Cyril Connolly

    Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.

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    Cyril Connolly

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

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    Cyril Connolly

    Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.

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    Cyril Connolly

    Carelessness is not fatal to journalism, nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once; a journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow.

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    Cyril Connolly

    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 discovered.

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    Cyril Connolly

    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-Prés: 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.

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    Cyril Connolly

    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.

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    Cyril Connolly

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

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    Cyril Connolly

    Dining out is a vice, a dissipation of spirit punished by remorse. We eat, drink, and talk a little too much, abuse all our friends, belch out our literary preferences and are egged on by accomplices in the audience to acts of mental exhibitionism. Such evenings cannot fail to diminish those who take part in them. They end on Monkey Hill.

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    Cyril Connolly

    Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.

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    Cyril Connolly

    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.

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    Cyril Connolly

    Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.

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    Cyril Connolly

    Except for poverty, incompatibility, opposition of parents, absence of love on one side and of desire to marry on both, nothing stands in the way of our happy union.

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    Cyril Connolly

    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.

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    Cyril Connolly

    Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.

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    Cyril Connolly

    For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?

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    Cyril Connolly

    From now on - specialize; never again make any concession to the ninety-nine percent of you which is like everyon else at the expense of the one percent which is unique.

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    Cyril Connolly

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

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    Cyril Connolly

    Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph-green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.

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    Cyril Connolly

    Happiness lies in the fulfillment of the spirit through the body.

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    Cyril Connolly

    Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.

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    Cyril Connolly

    Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate; a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.

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    Cyril Connolly

    He [George Orwell] would not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.

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    Cyril Connolly

    Hemingway is great in that alone of living writers he has saturated his work with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love and the remorse which is the shadow of that sun.

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    Cyril Connolly

    How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?

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    Cyril Connolly

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

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    Cyril Connolly

    If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.

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    Cyril Connolly

    If one is too lazy to think, too vain to do a thing badly, too cowardly to admit it, one will never attain wisdom.

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    Cyril Connolly

    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.

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    Cyril Connolly

    Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.

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    Cyril Connolly

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

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    Cyril Connolly

    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.

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    Cyril Connolly

    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?