Quotes from Cyril Connolly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.

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 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.

In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient; afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.

The artist secretes nostalgia around life.