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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Destroy him as you will, the bourgeois always bounces up — execute him, expropriate him, starve him out en masse, and he reappears in your children.”

“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.”

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

“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, 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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“'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.'”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.”

“Flaubert 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.”

“Man axalotl here below but I ask very little. Some fragments of Pamphylides, a Choctaw blood-mask, the prose of Scaliger the Elder, a painting by Fuseli, an occasional visit to the all-in wrestling, or to my meretrix; a cook who can produce a passable 'poulet à la Khmer,' a Pong vase. Simple tastes, you will agree, and it is my simple habit to indulge them!”

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

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