Cyril Connolly quotes - page 2

Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium. (Cyril Connolly)
Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form. View quote
Cyril Connolly
Failure on the other hand is infectious. The world is full of charming failures (for all charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others) and unless the writer is quite ruthless with these amiable footlers, they will drag him down with them. View quote
Cyril Connolly
It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book. View quote
Cyril Connolly
A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends. View quote
Cyril Connolly
Melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality; we run aground sooner than the flat-bottomed pleasure-lovers but we venture out in weather that would sink them and we choose our direction. View quote
Cyril Connolly
It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential. View quote
Cyril Connolly
Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth. View quote
Cyril Connolly
The lesson one can learn from Firbank is that of inconsequence. There is the vein which he tapped and which has not yet been fully exploited. View quote
Cyril Connolly
The refractory pupil of Socrates, Aristippus the Cyrene, who believed happiness to be the sum of particular pleasures and golden moments and not, as Epicurus, a prolonged intermediary state between ecstasy and pain. View quote
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)
Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last. View quote
Cyril Connolly
Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy. View quote
Cyril Connolly
Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius. View quote
Cyril Connolly
Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control. View quote
Cyril Connolly
Truth is a river that is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between the arms the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the main river. View quote
Cyril Connolly
So wrote Pater, calling an art-for-art's sake muezzin to the faithful from the topmost turret of the ivory tower. View quote
Cyril Connolly
Man axalotl here below but I ask very little. Some fragments of Pamphylides, a Choctaw blood-mask, the prose of Scaliger the Elder, a painting by Fuseli, an occasional visit to the all-in wrestling, or to my meretrix; a cook who can produce a passable 'poulet à la Khmer,' a Pong vase. Simple tastes, you will agree, and it is my simple habit to indulge them! View quote
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. View quote
Cyril Connolly
Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present. View quote
Cyril Connolly
Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear. (Cyril Connolly)
We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy. View quote
Cyril Connolly
In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female. View quote
Cyril Connolly
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. View quote
Cyril Connolly
No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind. View quote
Cyril Connolly