Quotes from Cyril Connolly

Youth is a period of missed opportunities.

We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion.

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

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.

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.

there is a way of leaving and yet of not leaving; of hinting that one loves and is willing to return, yet never coming back and so preserving a relationship in a lingering decay.

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.

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.

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

A rune for the very bored: when very bored say to yourself: It was during the next twenty minutes that there occurred one of those tiny incidents which revolutionizes the whole course of our life and alter the face of history. Truly we are the playthings of enormous fates.

Is it possible to love any human being without being torn limb from limb?

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.

If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given to 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.

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

While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living. Cyril Connolly (English critic and editor, 1903-1974)

It is significant comment on the victory of science over magic that were someone to say 'if I put this pill in your beer it will explode,' we might believe them; but were they to cry 'if I pronounce this spell over your beer it will go flat,' we should remain incredulous and Paracelsus, the Alchemists, Aleister Crowley and all the Magi have lived in vain. Yet when I read science I turn magical; when I study magic, scientific.

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

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.

It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.

In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.

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

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

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.

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