Quotes from Cyril Connolly

A love affair is a grafting operation. "What has once been joined never forgets". There is a moment when the graft takes; up to then it is possible without difficulty the separation which afterwards comes only through breaking off a great hunk of oneself; the ingrown fibre of hours, days, years.

I am now forced to admit that anxiety is my true condition, occasionally intruded on by work, pleasure, melancholy or despair.

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

We fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noises.

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.

Like many lazy people, once I started work I could not stop; perhaps that is why we avoid it.

He felt old and miserable, going through life trying to peddle a personality of which people would not even accept a free sample.

Why do ants alone have parasites whose intoxicating moistures they drink and for whom they will sacrifice even their young? Because as they are the most highly socialized of insects, so their lives are the most intolerable.

Never will I make that extra effort to live according to reality which alone makes good writing possible: hence the manic-depressiveness of my style,—which is either bright, cruel and superficial; or pessimistic; moth-eaten with self-pity

We pay for vice by the knowledge that we are wicked; we pay for pleasure when we find out too late that we are nothing.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." - "Meglio scrivere per se stessi e non avere un pubblico piuttosto che scrivere per gli altri e non essere se stessi".

Both my happiness and unhappiness I owe to the love of pleasure; of sex, travel, reading, conversation (hearing oneself talk), food, drink, cigars and lying in warm water.

Contemporary books do not keep. The quality in them which makes for their success is the first to go; they turn over night. – Cyril Connolly

Happiness is in the imagination. What we perform is always inferior to what we imagine.

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.

Thus tea, coffee, alcohol stimulate. So do heights, wet days, south-west gales, hotel bedrooms in Paris and windows overlooking harbours. Also snow, frost, the electric bell outside a cinema at night, sex-life and fever.

La Conspiración Vegetal: El Hombre está ahora en guardia ante los insectos parasitarios; ante tenias, termitas, escarabajos, pero ¿ha prestado alguna atención a la posibilidad de que haya sido elegido como objetivo del ataque vegetal, señalado por la viña, el lúpulo, el enebro, la planta del tabaco, la hoja de té y el grano de café para ser destruido?

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

Popular success is a palace built for a writer by publishers, journalists, admirers, and professional reputation makers, in which a silent army of termites, rats, dry rot, and death-watch beetles are tunnelling away, till, at the very moment of completion, it is ready to fall down.

When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized.

Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.

The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.

Like the bee its sting, the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer.

The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him