Quotes from Cyril Connolly

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

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

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

Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.

There are about forty-nine masochists to one sadist.

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

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.

Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.

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

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

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

Everything is a dangerous drug except reality, which is unendurable.

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

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

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

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.

The only happy talkers are dandies who extract pleasure from the very perishability of their material and who would not be able to tolerate the isolation of all other forms of composition; for most good talkers, when they have run down, are miserable; they know that they have betrayed themselves, that they have taken material which should have a life of its own, to dispense it in noises upon the air.

Those whom the gods would destroy, they first call promising.

What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?

It is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.

Neither harsh reviews, the contempt of equals nor the indifference of superiors can affect those who have once tapped the great heart of suffering humanity and found out what a goldmine it is.

Early laurels weigh like lead and of many of the boys whom I knew at Eton, I can say that their lives are over .... Once again romanticism with its death wish is to blame, for it lays an emphasis on childhood, on a fall from grace which is not compensated for by any doctrine of future redemption.

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.

The artist secretes nostalgia around life.