Cyril Connolly

He reduced everything to politics; he was also unalterably of the Left. His line may have been unpopular or unfashionable, but he followed it unhesitatingly; in fact it was an obsession. He could not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.

— Cyril Connolly politics

Andre Deutsch Limited,

— Cyril Connolly

I greet you, my educated fellow bourgeois, whose interests and whose doubts I share.

— Cyril Connolly doubt

I shall christen this style the , since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.

— Cyril Connolly love

The Mandarin style at its best yields the richest and most complete expression of the English language. It is the diction of , , , , , , ,andas opposed to that of , , , , , , ,and . It is characterized by long sentences with many dependent clauses, by the use of the subjunctive and conditional, by exclamations and interjections, quotations, allusions, metaphors, long images, Latin terminology, subtlety and conceits. Its cardinal assumption is that neither the writer nor the reader is in a hurry, that both are possessed of a classical education and a private income. It isEnglish.

— Cyril Connolly education

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques.

— Cyril Connolly writing

We write in the language of Dryden and Addison, ofand , but the intellectual world we inhabit is that ofand ; it is to them, and not to their English contemporaries, that we owe our conception of modern life. The artist whose reward is perfection and where perfection can be obtained only by a separation of standards from those of the non-artist is led to adopt one of four r

— Cyril Connolly life

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.

— Cyril Connolly learn

So wrote , calling an art-for-art's sake muezzin to the faithful from the topmost turret of the ivory tower.

— Cyril Connolly faith

The refractory pupil of ,the Cyrene, who believed happiness to be the sum of particular pleasures and golden moments and not, as , a prolonged intermediary state between ecstasy and pain.

— Cyril Connolly happiness

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

— Cyril Connolly art

Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first call promising. 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 writers

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

— Cyril Connolly love

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.

— Cyril Connolly people

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 , , ,and , 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 art

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.

— Cyril Connolly life

To this period [age seven] I trace my worst faults. Indecision, for I found that by hesitating for a long time over two toys in a shop I would be given both and so was tempted to make two alternatives always seem equally attractive; Ingratitude, for I grew so used to having what I wanted that I assumed it as a right; Laziness, for sloth is the especial vice of tyrants; the Impatience with boredom that is generated by devotion; the Cruelty which comes from a knowledge of power and the Giving way to moods, for I learnt that sulking, crying, moping and malingering were bluffs that paid.

— Cyril Connolly knowledge

Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving , it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.

— Cyril Connolly war

You imply our education is of no use to you in after life. But no education is. We are not an employment agency; all we can do is to give you a grounding in the art of mixing with your fellow men, to tell you what to expect from life and give you an outward manner and inward poise, an old prescription from the eighteenth century which we call a classical education, an education which confers the infrequent virtues of good sense and good taste and the benefit of dual nationality, English and Mediterranean, and which, taking into account the difficulties of modern life, we find the philosophy best able to overcome them.

— Cyril Connolly life

Persea Books, 1981,

— Cyril Connolly sea

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.

— Cyril Connolly dreams

'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.'

— Cyril Connolly you

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

— Cyril Connolly learn

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.

— Cyril Connolly war

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

— Cyril Connolly man

Everything is a dangerous drug to me except reality, which is unendurable.

— Cyril Connolly reality

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

— Cyril Connolly man

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

— Cyril Connolly fear

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 or ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality. Neurotics are heartless.

— Cyril Connolly art

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

— Cyril Connolly man

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

— Cyril Connolly nature

Miserablewho, turning to lose his , beholds her for the first time as well as the last.

— Cyril Connolly time

To succeed a great artist must have both character and fanaticism and few in this country are willing to pay the price.

— Cyril Connolly art

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.

— Cyril Connolly art

Ridiculous as may seem the dualities of conflict at a given time, it does not follow that dualism is a worthless process. 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 life

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 will be lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, our popularity, our vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may be able to cease from hating. Analyse in this way the hatred of ideas or of the kind of people whom we have once loved and whose faces are preserved in Spirits of Anger. Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate; a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.

— Cyril Connolly love

Melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality...

— Cyril Connolly reality

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 love

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.

— Cyril Connolly

"Man axalotl here below but I ask very little. Some fragments of Pamphylides, ablood-mask, the prose ofthe Elder, a painting by , an occasional visit to the all-in wrestling, or to my meretrix; a cook who can produce a passable 'poulet

— Cyril Connolly pain

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

— Cyril Connolly war

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

— Cyril Connolly man

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

— Cyril Connolly love

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

— Cyril Connolly fear

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

— Cyril Connolly crime

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 life

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life.

— Cyril Connolly life

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

— Cyril Connolly fear

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

— Cyril Connolly friends

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.

— Cyril Connolly love

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

— Cyril Connolly people

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

— Cyril Connolly war

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

— Cyril Connolly book

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 faith

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.

— Cyril Connolly book

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

— Cyril Connolly faith

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

— Cyril Connolly darkness

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

— Cyril Connolly writing

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 time

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

— Cyril Connolly food

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 home

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

— Cyril Connolly nature

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

— Cyril Connolly man

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

— Cyril Connolly art

The true index of a mans character is the health of his wife.

— Cyril Connolly man

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

— Cyril Connolly life

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