Quotes from Cyril Connolly

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

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

When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.

Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.

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

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.

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

Most of the beauty of women evaporates when they achieve domestic happiness at the price of their independence.

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

The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.

No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.

That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.

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

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.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. [ The New Statesman , February 25, 1933]

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

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

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.

art is made by the alone for the alone… The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication...

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

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.

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

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

No opinions, no ideas, no real knowledge of anything, no ideals, no inspiration; a fat, slothful, querulous, greedy, impotent carcass; a stump, a decaying belly washed up on the shore... Always tired, always bored, always hurt, always hating.