Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, Enemies of Promise
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learnt to walk.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Unquiet Grave
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The New Statesman, Feb. 25, 1933
Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Condemned Playground
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.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, Enemies of Promise
One lived, however unprofitably; one loved, or ceased to love; one changed, or did not change.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Rock Pool
Our memories are card-indexes consulted and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Unquiet Grave
Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, Enemies of Promise
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.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Unquiet Grave
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.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Unquiet Grave
The artist ... walks at first with his companions, till one day he 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, only to re-immerse itself in the solitude of the limestone and carry him along its winding tunnel, until it gushes out through the misty creeper-hung cave which he has always believed to exist, and sets him back in the sun.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Condemned Playground
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Unquiet Grave
Destroy him as you will, the bourgeois always bounces up — execute him, expropriate him, starve him out en masse, and he reappears in your children.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Observer, Mar. 7, 1937
Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Unquiet Grave
We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Unquiet Grave
It is difficult to prove that any age has been propitious for the artist; Socrates was condemned to death, so were Seneca and Petronius, Dante was exiled, the age of Louis XIV was one of both civil and religious persecution; the nineteenth century, as the lawsuits against Flaubert, Baudelaire, Hugo, etc., show, was not much better; and in the twentieth century there are whole tracts of Europe where to be a writer is to invite a firing-squad. "Silence, exile, and cunning" are the artist's lot, and, exquisite though his happiness will be when his public, educated at last, mobs him like a film-star, we may be wiser to assume that, for our lifetime, "silence, exile, and cunning" it will remain.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Condemned Playground
Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Unquiet Grave
There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Unquiet Grave
Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Condemned Playground
Young writers if they are to mature require a period of between three and seven years in which to live down their promise. Promise is like the mediaeval hangman who after settling the noose, pushed his victim off the platform and jumped on his back, his weight acting a drop while his jockeying arms prevented the unfortunate from loosening the rope. When he judged him dead he dropped to the ground.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, Enemies of Promise
Unable to love, however, he still believed in disinterested friendship.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Rock Pool
The artist secretes nostalgia around life.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Unquiet Grave
If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given to 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.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Unquiet Grave
The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Selected Essays of Cyril Connolly
Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Unquiet Grave
In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Unquiet Grave
It is a consolation of human life that the sick forget what it is like to feel well, or the miserable to be happy.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Condemned Playground
While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Unquiet Grave
Oh, I know all about it -- the long line of plain women and queer men -- they gave you everything except a face and a fortune.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Rock Pool
We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Unquiet Grave
The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Unquiet Grave
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.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Unquiet Grave
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.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Unquiet Grave
