Cyril Connolly Quotes

153 quotes in 1880 categories

• The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
• Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.
• When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the…
• In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient; afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.
• No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.
• Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.
• 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…
• Like the bee its sting, the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer.
• Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.
• Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.
• Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.
• 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.
• No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
• Dining out is a vice, a dissipation of spirit punished by remorse. We eat, drink, and talk a little too much, abuse all our friends,…
• Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectified. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.
• I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because…
• Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.
• There is immunity in reading, immunity in formal society, in office routine, in the company of old friends and in the giving of officious help…
• A great writer created a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in…
• Hemingway is great in that alone of living writers he has saturated his work with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water,…

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