List of Cyril Connolly Quotes

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.

The True Function Of A Writer Is To Produce A Masterpiece And No Other Task Is Of Any Consequence.

When Young We Are Faithful To Individuals, When Older We Grow Loyal To Situations And To Types.

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 Lightest Action But By The Most Harmless Pleasure, I Feel Man To Be Of All Living Things The Most Biologically Incompetent And Ill-organized. Why Has He Acquired A Seventy Years Life-span Only To Poison It Incurably By The Mere Being Of Himself? Why Has He Thrown Conscience, Like A Dead Rat, To Putrefy In The Well?

Nothing Dates Like Hate And In Literature A Little Of It Goes A Very Long Way.

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.

Hate Is Crystallized Fear, Fear's Dividend, Fear Objectivized. We Hate What We Fear And So Where Hate Is, Fear Will Be Lurking.

When Even Despair Ceases To Serve Any Creative Purpose, Then Surely We Are Justified In Suicide.

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.

It Is A Consolation Of Human Life That The Sick Forget What It Is Like To Feel Well, Or The Miserable To Be Happy.

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 We Are; Like Fishes Not Meant To Swim.

Longevity Is The Revenge Of Talent Upon Genius.