Cyril Connolly quotes - page 4

It is by a blend of lively curiosity and intelligent selfishness that the artists who wish to mature late, who feel too old to die, the Goethes, Tolstoys, Voltaires, Titians and Verdis, reach a fruitful senescence. They cannot afford to associate with those who are burning themselves up or preparing for a tragedy or whom melancholy has marked for her own. Not for them the accident-prone, the friend in whom the desire for self-destruction keeps blistering out in broken legs or threatening them in anxiety-neuroses. Not for them the drumming finger, the close-cropt nail, the chewed glasses, the pause on the threshold, the wandering eye, or the repeated ‘um' and ‘er.' (Cyril Connolly)
Dry again?' said the Crab to the Rock-Pool. 'So would you be,' replied the Rock-Pool, 'if you had to satisfy, twice a day, the insatiable sea. View quote
Cyril Connolly
I have always disliked myself at any given moment the total of such moments is my life. View quote
Cyril Connolly
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. View quote
Cyril Connolly
If one is too lazy to think, too vain to do a thing badly, too cowardly to admit it, one will never attain wisdom. View quote
Cyril Connolly
We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self. View quote
Cyril Connolly
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. View quote
Cyril Connolly
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. View quote
Cyril Connolly
The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life. View quote
Cyril Connolly
The person who is master of their passions is reason's slave. View quote
Cyril Connolly
A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossed with oneself, malignant and ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality. (Cyril Connolly)
Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations. View quote
Cyril Connolly
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. View quote
Cyril Connolly
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 encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-PrTs there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past. View quote
Cyril Connolly
There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God. View quote
Cyril Connolly
Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do. View quote
Cyril Connolly
He could not blow his nose without moralizing on the state of the handkerchief industry. View quote
Cyril Connolly
An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness. View quote
Cyril Connolly
Flaubert spoke true: to succeed a great artist must have both character and fanaticism and few in this country are willing to pay the price. Our writers have either no personality and therefore no style or a false personality and therefore a bad style; they mistake prejudice for energy and accept the sensation of material well-being as a system of thought. View quote
Cyril Connolly
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. View quote
Cyril Connolly
The greatest problem with women is how to contrive that they should seem our equals. (Cyril Connolly)
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. View quote
Cyril Connolly
Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality. View quote
Cyril Connolly
Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph -- green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree. View quote
Cyril Connolly
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. View quote
Cyril Connolly