Cyril Connolly quotes:

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives.

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

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

Youth is a period of missed opportunities.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.

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.

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

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

When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.

A best-seller is the golden touch of mediocre talent.

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

The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.

The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.

Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.

The more I see of life the more I perceive that only through solitary communion with nature can one gain an idea of its richness and meaning.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.

Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph-green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.

The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization; the factors of decadence, -- luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, -- are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

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

It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.

Dining out is a vice, a dissipation of spirit punished by remorse. We eat, drink, and talk a little too much, abuse all our friends, belch out our literary preferences and are egged on by accomplices in the audience to acts of mental exhibitionism. Such evenings cannot fail to diminish those who take part in them. They end on Monkey Hill.

The Expulsion from Eden is an act of vindictive womanish spite; the Fall of Man, as recounted in the Bible, comes nearer to the Fall of God.

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

A great writer created 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.

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life.

In America every woman has her set of girl-friends; some are cousins, the rest are gained at school. These form a permanent committee who sit on each other's affairs, who come out together, marry and divorce together, and who end as those groups of bustling, heartless well-informed club-women who govern society. Against them the Couple of Ehepaar is helpless and Man in their eyes but a biological interlude.

There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.

He [George Orwell] would not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.

The headmistress was an able instructress in French and history and we learned with her as fast as fear could teach us.

Except for poverty, incompatibility, opposition of parents, absence of love on one side and of desire to marry on both, nothing stands in the way of our happy union.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.

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.

The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.

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

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

Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment.

Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.

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

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.

We may assume that we keep people waiting symbolically because we do not wish to see them and that our anxiety is due not to being late, but to having to see them at all.

Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.

How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?

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

A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious retreat of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.

The headmistress was an able instructress in French and history and we learned with her as fast as fear could teach us

There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall

If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given 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

When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow more loyal to situations and to types

No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, - something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.

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

Hemingway is great in that alone of living writers he has saturated his work with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love and the remorse which is the shadow of that sun.

Beneath this mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivilous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit ridden, I let it reform.

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

Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.

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

The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.

That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.

Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.

We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.

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

There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another.

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.

Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.

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.

The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.

The dread of lonliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.

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.

No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.

For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?

Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.

In the dream of approaching forty I saw myself as about to die and realized that I was no longer myself, but a creature inhabited entirely by parasites, as a caterpillar is occupied by the grubs of the ichneumon fly. Gin, whisky, sloth, fear, guilt, tobacco, had made themselves my inquilines; alcohol sloshed about within, while tendrils of melon and vine grew out of ears and nostrils; my mind was a worn gramophone record, my true self was such a ruin as to seem non-existent, and all this had happened in the last three years.

While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

Industrial society seems likely to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems

English Law: where there are two alternatives: one intelligent, one stupid; one attractive, one vulgar; one noble, one ape-like; one serious and sincere, one undignified and false; one far-sighted, one short; EVERYBODY will INVARIABLY choose the latter.

If one is too lazy to think, too vain to do a thing badly, too cowardly to admit it, one will never attain wisdom.

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.

In the sex-war, thoughtlessness is a weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female. Both are reciprocally generated, but a woman's desire for revenge outlasts all other emotion. Yet when every unkind word about women has been said, we have still to admit, with Byron, that they are nicer than men. They are more devoted, more unselfish and more emotionally sincere. When the long fuse of cruelty, deceit and revenge is set alight, it is male thoughtlessness which has fired it.

There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear is lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, popularity, vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may learn to cease from hating. Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noises.

No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.

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.

Approaching forty, I had a singular dream in which I almost grasped the meaning and understood the nature of what it is that wastes in wasted time.

The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.

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

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.

An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.

Everyone has the right to express an opinion. No one has the right to be listened to.

In a perfect union the man and woman are like a strung bow. Who is to say whether the string bends the bow, or the bow tightens the string?

When in doubt, choose greatness.

M is for Marx And clashing of classes And movement of masses And massing of asses.

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

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

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

An aesthetic movement with a revolutionary dynamism and no popular appeal should proceed quite otherwise than by public scandal, publicity stunt, noisy expulsion and excommunication.

Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.

We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.

There is no suicide for which all society is not responsible.

The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.

Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.

It is the fear of middle-age in the young, of old-age in the middle-aged, which is the prime cause of infidelity, that infallible rejuvenator.

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be discovered.

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