Cyril Connolly Quotes

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

~ Cyril Connolly

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

~ Cyril Connolly

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

~ Cyril Connolly

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.

~ Cyril Connolly

Two fears alternate in marriage, of loneliness and of bondage. The dread of loneliness being keener than the fear of bondage, we get married. For one person who fears being thus tied there are four who dread being set free. Yet the love of liberty is a noble passion and one to which most married people secretly aspire, -- in moments when they are not neurotically dependent -- but by then it is too late; the ox does not become a bull, not the hen a falcon.The fear of loneliness can be overcome, for it springs from weakness; human beings are intended to be free, and to be free is to be lonely, but the fear of bondage is the apprehension of a real danger, and so I find it all the more pathetic to watch young men and beautiful girls taking refuge in marriage from an imaginary danger, a sad loss to their friends ad a sore trial to each other. First love is the one most worth having, yet the best marriage is often the second, for we should marry only when the desire for freedom be spent; not till then does a man know whether he is the kind who can settle down. The most tragic breakings-up are of those couples who have married young and who have enjoyed seven years of happiness, after which the banked fires of passion and independence explode -- and without knowing why, for they still love each other, they set about accomplishing their common destruction.

~ Cyril Connolly

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.

~ Cyril Connolly

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

~ Cyril Connolly

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no

~ Cyril Connolly

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

~ Cyril Connolly

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.

~ Cyril Connolly

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.

~ Cyril Connolly

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

~ Cyril Connolly

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those that do.

~ Cyril Connolly

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

~ Cyril Connolly

We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of self.

~ Cyril Connolly

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

~ Cyril Connolly

Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self.

~ Cyril Connolly

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

~ Cyril Connolly

We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.

~ Cyril Connolly

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

~ Cyril Connolly

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

~ Cyril Connolly

The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.

~ Cyril Connolly

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

~ Cyril Connolly

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

~ Cyril Connolly

The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.

~ Cyril Connolly

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.

~ Cyril Connolly

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

~ Cyril Connolly

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

~ Cyril Connolly

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.

~ Cyril Connolly

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

~ Cyril Connolly

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

~ Cyril Connolly

The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.

~ Cyril Connolly

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.

~ Cyril Connolly