We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Love
The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Solitude
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
Topics: Conversation
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
Topics: Friends and Friendship, Government, Women
A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossing with oneself, malignant and ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Insanity
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Self-respect, Authors & Writing, Writing
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
Topics: Civilization
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
Topics: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Loneliness, Marriage
Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of taste.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Profanity, Vulgarity, Swearing
Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph—green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Epitaphs
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
Topics: Marriage
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: City Life, Cities, Walking
The true index of a man’s character is the health of his wife.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Marriage, Wives
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
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
Topics: Success, Harmony, Existence
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.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: The Body
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
Topics: Wisdom
The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Weight, Diet, Food
Promise is the capacity for letting people down.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Potential
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 the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Critics, Criticism
The person who is master of their passions is reason’s slave.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Reason
There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Gossip, Suicide
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Talent, Praise
No taste is so acquired as that for someone else’s quality of mind.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Style, Taste
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
Topics: Hate
When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing
Happiness lies in the fulfillment of the spirit through the body.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Action, Happiness
The secret of happiness … is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm, always lucid, always willing “to be joined to the universe without being more conscious of it than an idiot,” to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Acceptance, Happiness
When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.
—Cyril Connolly
Topics: Age
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- L. P. Hartley British Writer, Critic
- J. R. R. Tolkien British Philologist, Writer
- Pico Iyer British-born Essayist, Novelist of Indian Origin
- Robert Hugh Benson English Author, Clergyman
- John Michell English Esotericist, New Age Writer
- Maurice Baring British Author
- Philip Pullman English Children’s Author, Dramatist
- Kingsley Amis English Novelist, Poet
- Ian McEwan (b.1948) British Novelist, Short-story Writer
- Hanif Kureishi British Novelist, Screenwriter
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