Cyril connolly quotes

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

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.

Young writers if they are to mature require a period of between three and seven years in which to live down their promise. Promise is like the mediaeval hangman who after settling the noose, pushed his victim off the platform and jumped on his back, his weight acting a drop while his jockeying arms prevented the unfortunate from loosening the rope. When he judged him dead he dropped to the ground.

We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.

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.

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.

The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.

Only by avoiding the beginning of things can we escape their end.

The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Like the bee its sting, the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer.

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.

The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

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.

When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.

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

There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another... It is when we begin to hurt those whom we love that the guilt with which we are born becomes intolerable, and since all those whom we love intensely and continuously grow part of us, and since we hate ourselves in them, so we torture ourselves and them together.

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

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

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

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

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

Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment.

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.

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

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

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

Sheep with a nasty side.

The lesson one can learn from Firbank is that of inconsequence. There is the vein which he tapped and which has not yet been fully exploited.

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

It is the fear of middle-age in the young, of old-age in the middle-aged, which is the prime cause of infidelity, that infallible rejuvenator.

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

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

Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.

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

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.

Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

The disasters of the world are due to its inhabitants not being able to grow old simultaneously. There is always a raw and intolerant nation eager to destroy the tolerant and mellow.

Promise is the capacity for letting people down.

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.

The detective story itself is in a dilemma. It is a vein which is in danger of being worked out, the demand is constant, the powers of supply variable, and the reader, with each one he absorbs, grows a little more sophisticated and harder to please, while the novelist, after each one he writes, becomes a little more exhausted.

There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.

In the dream of approaching forty I saw myself as about to die and realized that I was no longer myself, but a creature inhabited entirely by parasites, as a caterpillar is occupied by the grubs of the ichneumon fly. Gin, whisky, sloth, fear, guilt, tobacco, had made themselves my inquilines; alcohol sloshed about within, while tendrils of melon and vine grew out of ears and nostrils; my mind was a worn gramophone record, my true self was such a ruin as to seem non-existent, and all this had happened in the last three years.

The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.

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

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.

There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another.

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

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

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.

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

When in doubt, choose greatness.

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

The English masses are lovable: they are kind, decent, tolerant, practical and not stupid. The tragedy is that they are too many of them, and that they are aimless, having outgrown the servile functions for which they were encouraged to multiply. One day these huge crowds will have to seize power because there will be nothing else for them to do, and yet they neither demand power nor are ready to make use of it; they will learn only to be bored in a new way.

Flaubert spoke true: to succeed a great artist must have both character and fanaticism and few in this country are willing to pay the price. Our writers have either no personality and therefore no style or a false personality and therefore a bad style; they mistake prejudice for energy and accept the sensation of material well-being as a system of thought.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.

Two weeks before his death, a friend asked him half jokingly if he had discovered any meaning in life. "Yes," he replied, "there is a meaning; at least, for me, there is one thing that matters - to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people."

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

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

The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.

There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.

Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.

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

The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.

The more I see of life the more I perceive that only through solitary communion with nature can one gain an idea of its richness and meaning.

The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.

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.

We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.

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

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.

Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.

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

The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.

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

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.

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?

No education is worth having that does not teach the lesson of concentration on a task, however unattractive. These lessons, if not learnt early, will be learnt, if at all, with pain and grief in later life.

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

Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.

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.

There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear is lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, our popularity, our vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may be able to cease from hating... Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate; a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.

How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?

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

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.

Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.

Melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality; we run aground sooner than the flat-bottomed pleasure-lovers but we venture out in weather that would sink them and we choose our direction.

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.

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.

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

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

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

No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.

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.

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.

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.

Youth is a period of missed opportunities.

The headmistress was an able instructress in French and history and we learned with her as fast as fear could teach us.

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.

M is for Marx And clashing of classes And movement of masses And massing of asses.

The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.

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

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.

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

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

Everyone has the right to express an opinion. No one has the right to be listened to.