Cyril Connolly Quotes - Page 6

Quotes about:

• Carelessness is not fatal to journalism, nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once; a journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow.

  Cyril Connolly

  Eye, Facts, Tomorrow

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Years, Promise

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.109, University of Chicago Press

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Cyril Connolly

  Morning, Lying, Night

  Cyril Connolly (1946). “The Condemned Playground”

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Veins, Lessons

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.36, University of Chicago Press

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Cyril Connolly

  Stupid, Intelligent, Thinking

  Cyril Connolly (1960). “Enemies of promise and other essays: an autobiography of ideas”

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Cyril Connolly

  Dream, Years, Self

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Cyril Connolly

  Love, Marriage, Parent

  David Pryce-Jones, Cyril Connolly (1984). “Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir”

  26 Copy quote

• 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.

  Cyril Connolly

  Stupid, Power, Bored

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Cyril Connolly

  Rivers, Sitting, Tipping

  16 Copy quote

• In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient; afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.

  Cyril Connolly

  Emotional, Feelings, Unbearable

  4 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Nature, Men, Literature

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Cyril Connolly

  Mistake, Literature, Matter

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.105, University of Chicago Press

  7 Copy quote

• In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.

  Cyril Connolly

  Together, Drink, Believer

  4 Copy quote

• Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.

  Cyril Connolly

  Dresses, Belief, Crabs

  8 Copy quote

• Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.

  Cyril Connolly

  Art, Past, Reality

  14 Copy quote

• The greatest problem with women is how to contrive that they should seem our equals

  Cyril Connolly

  Problem, Should, Seems

  David Pryce-Jones, Cyril Connolly (1984). “Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir”

  4 Copy quote

• Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.

  Cyril Connolly

  Revenge, Intelligence, Intellectual

  Cyril Connolly (1975). “The evening colonnade”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Cyril Connolly

  Friendship, Girl, Cousin

  7 Copy quote

• The only happy talkers are dandies who extract pleasure from the very perishability of their material and who would not be able to tolerate the isolation of all other forms of composition; for most good talkers, when they have run down, are miserable; they know that they have betrayed themselves, that they have taken material which should have a life of its own, to dispense it in noises upon the air.

  Cyril Connolly

  Running, Taken, Air

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.107, University of Chicago Press

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Birthday, Wisdom, Book

  4 Copy quote

• Nothing dates like hate and in literature a little of it goes a very long way.

  Cyril Connolly

  Hate, Long, Literature

  Cyril Connolly (1975). “The evening colonnade”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Cyril Connolly

  Travel, Past, Years

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.114, University of Chicago Press

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Cyril Connolly

  People, Waiting, Anxiety

  60 Copy quote

• We fear something before we hate.

  Cyril Connolly

  Hate, Anticipation

  "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

  7 Copy quote

• The artist secretes nostalgia around life.

  Cyril Connolly

  Artist, Nostalgia

  4 Copy quote

Page 6 of 7

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin