Top 173 Quotes & Sayings by Cyril Connolly

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English journalist Cyril Connolly.

Last updated on April 14, 2025.

Cyril Vernon Connolly was an English literary critic and writer. He was the editor of the influential literary magazine Horizon (1940–49) and wrote Enemies of Promise (1938), which combined literary criticism with an autobiographical exploration of why he failed to become the successful author of fiction that he had aspired to be in his youth.

English - Journalist | September 10, 1903 - November 26, 1974

Source: Wikipedia

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.

Cyril Connolly

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

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

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

Youth is a period of missed opportunities.

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

Cyril Connolly

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

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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.

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

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

Cyril Connolly

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

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life.

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

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

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly

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

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

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

Cyril Connolly

We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.

Cyril Connolly

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

Cyril Connolly