Quotes from Cyril Connolly

It is a consolation of human life that the sick forget what it is like to feel well, or the miserable to be happy.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

A great writer creates 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Youth is a period of missed opportunities.

A ceremony of self-wastage - good talkers are miserable, they know that they have betrayed themselves, that they have taken material which should have a life of its own, to disperse it in noises upon the air.

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

The secret of happiness ... is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm, always lucid, always willing "to be joined to the universe without being more conscious of it than an idiot," to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.

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

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

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

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.

A writer who takes up journalism abandons the slow tempo of literature for a faster one and the change will do him harm. By degrees the flippancy of journalism will become a habit and the pleasure of being paid on the nail and more especially of being praised on the nail, grow indispensable.

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

Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.