Cyril Connolly Quotes

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." [The New Statesman, February 25, 1933]

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

Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.

...art is made by the alone for the alone… The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication...

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.

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

Beneath this mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivilous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit ridden, I let it reform.

There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another... It is when we begin to hurt those whom we love that the guilt with which we are born becomes intolerable, and since all those whom we love intensely and continuously grow part of us, and since we hate ourselves in them, so we torture ourselves and them together.

When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.

We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion.

Books. The more I thought about how to stop and get myself back together as one sane, whole person, the more I thought about books. I thought about escape. Not running to escape but reading to escape. Cyril Connolly, twentieth-century writer and critic, wrote that “words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.” That was how I wanted to use books: as an escape back to life. I wanted to engulf myself in books and come up whole again.

Youth is a period of missed opportunities.

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

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.

There are only three things which make life worth living: to be writing a tolerably good book, to be in a dinner party of six, and to be traveling south with someone whom your conscience permits you to love.

While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living. Cyril Connolly (English critic and editor, 1903-1974)

...there is a way of leaving and yet of not leaving; of hinting that one loves and is willing to return, yet never coming back and so preserving a relationship in a lingering decay.

No opinions, no ideas, no real knowledge of anything, no ideals, no inspiration; a fat, slothful, querulous, greedy, impotent carcass; a stump, a decaying belly washed up on the shore... Always tired, always bored, always hurt, always hating.

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.

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

It is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.

Is it possible to love any human being without being torn limb from limb?

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

If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given to 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.

Streets of Paris, pray for me; beaches in the sun, pray for me; ghosts of the lemurs, intercede for me; plane-tree and laurel-rose, shade me; summer rain on quays of Toulon, wash me away.

Neither harsh reviews, the contempt of equals nor the indifference of superiors can affect those who have once tapped the great heart of suffering humanity and found out what a goldmine it is.

The artist secretes nostalgia around life.

We fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noises.

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising. —Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise

A rune for the very bored: when very bored say to yourself: "It was during the next twenty minutes that there occurred one of those tiny incidents which revolutionizes the whole course of our life and alter the face of history. Truly we are the playthings of enormous fates.

When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide. For what better grounds for suicide can there be than to go on making the same series of false moves which invariably lead to the same disaster and to repeat a pattern without knowing why it is false or wherein lies the flaw? And yet to percieve that in ourselves revolves a cycle of activity which is certain to end in paralysis of the will, desertion, panic and despair - always to go on loving those who have ceased to love us, and who have quite lost all resemblance to the selves who we loved! Suicide is infectious; what if the agonies which suicide endure before they are driven to take their own life, the emotion of 'all is lost' - are infectious too?

A mutually fulfilled sexual union between two people is the rarest sensation which life can provide. But it is not quite real. It stops when the telephone rings. Such a passion can be kept at its early strength only by adding to it either more and more unhappiness (jealousy, separation, doubt, renunciation), or more and more artificiality (drink, technique, stage-illusions). Whoever has missed this has never lived, who lives for it alone is but partly alive.

I am now forced to admit that anxiety is my true condition, occasionally intruded on by work, pleasure, melancholy or despair.

He felt old and miserable, going through life trying to peddle a personality of which people would not even accept a free sample.

A life based on reason will always require to be balanced by an occasional bout of violent and irrational emotion, for the instinctual drives must be satisfied.

Cyril Connolly, twentieth-century writer and critic, wrote that ‘words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.’ That was how I wanted to use books: as an escape back to life. I wanted to engulf myself in books and come up whole again. p.20

When every unkind word about women has been said, we have still to admit, with Byron, that they are nicer than men. They are more devoted, more unselfish and more emotionally sincere. When the long fuse of cruelty, deceit and revenge is set alight, it is male thoughtlessness which has fired it.

Early laurels weigh like lead and of many of the boys whom I knew at Eton, I can say that their lives are over .... Once again romanticism with its death wish is to blame, for it lays an emphasis on childhood, on a fall from grace which is not compensated for by any doctrine of future redemption.

Never will I make that extra effort to live according to reality which alone makes good writing possible: hence the manic-depressiveness of my style,—which is either bright, cruel and superficial; or pessimistic; moth-eaten with self-pity

Reading the book now means that one can, if one wants, play Fantasy Literature--match writers off against each other and see who won over the long haul. Faulkner or Henry Green? I reckon the surprise champ was P.G. Wodehouse, as elegant and resourceful a prose stylist as anyone held up for our inspection here...he has turned out to be as enduring as anyone apart from Orwell. Jokes, you see. People do like jokes. (Hornby's thoughts after reading "Enemies of Promise" by Cyril Connolly)

Like many lazy people, once I started work I could not stop; perhaps that is why we avoid it.

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.

Both my happiness and unhappiness I owe to the love of pleasure; of sex, travel, reading, conversation (hearing oneself talk), food, drink, cigars and lying in warm water.

Whom the gods wish to destroy,” Cyril Connolly famously said, “they first call promising.

Este es el ego que “nos tira hacia abajo como si fuera la ley de gravedad”, como advertía el escritor Cyril Connolly.

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.

A love affair is a grafting operation. "What has once been joined never forgets". There is a moment when the graft takes; up to then it is possible without difficulty the separation which afterwards comes only through breaking off a great hunk of oneself; the ingrown fibre of hours, days, years.

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.

The Fall of Rome (for Cyril Connolly) The piers are pummelled by the waves; In a lonely field the rain Lashes an abandoned train; Outlaws fill the mountain caves. Fantastic grow the evening gowns; Agents of the Fisc pursue Absconding tax-defaulters through The sewers of provincial towns. Private rites of magic send The temple prostitutes to sleep; All the literati keep An imaginary friend. Cerebrotonic Cato may Extol the Ancient Disciplines, But the muscle-bound Marines Mutiny for food and pay. Caesar's double-bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK On a pink official form. Unendowed with wealth or pity, Little birds with scarlet legs, Sitting on their speckled eggs, Eye each flu-infected city. Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, Silently and very fast.

It is significant comment on the victory of science over magic that were someone to say ‘if I put this pill in your beer it will explode,’ we might believe them; but were they to cry ‘if I pronounce this spell over your beer it will go flat,’ we should remain incredulous and Paracelsus, the Alchemists, Aleister Crowley and all the Magi have lived in vain. Yet when I read science I turn magical; when I study magic, scientific.

Why do ants alone have parasites whose intoxicating moistures they drink and for whom they will sacrifice even their young? Because as they are the most highly socialized of insects, so their lives are the most intolerable.

When, as the football coach Bill Walsh explained, "self-confidence becomes arrogance, assertiveness becomes obstinacy, and self-assurance becomes reckless abandon." This is the ego, as the writer Cyril Connolly warned, that "sucks us down like the law of gravity.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. Cyril Connolly Even though I write for myself; however, I live and breathe, within the public; therefore, escape from it, may fail since as I'm also a part of that. Ehsan Sehgal

A child, left to play alone, says of quite an easy thing, 'Now I am going to to do something very difficult'. Soon, out of vanity, fear and emptiness, he builds up a world of custom, convention and myth in which everything must be just so; certain doors are one-way streets, certain trees sacred, certain paths taboo. Then along comes a grown-up or a more robust child; they kick over the imaginary wall, climb the forbidden tree, regard the difficult as easy and the private world is destroyed. The instinct to create myth, to colonize reality with the emotions, remains. The myths become tyrannies until they are swept away, when we invent new tyrannies to hide our suddenly perceived nakedness. Like caddis-worms or like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.

We pay for vice by the knowledge that we are wicked; we pay for pleasure when we find out too late that we are nothing.

La cultura europea ha sido muy fértil en la invención de infiernos.

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

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.

We are captivated by the feminine shadow of the self we might have been; in my case by that counterpart of the romantic writer who should have had the courage to reject society and to accept poverty for the sake of the development of his personality. Now when I see such beings I hope that I can somehow be freed from my shortcomings by union with them. Hence the recurrent longing to forsake external reality for a dream and to plunge into a ritual flight...I am attracted by those who mysteriously hold out a promise of the integrity which I have lost.

It’s when the notion of ourselves and the world grows so inflated that it begins to distort the reality that surrounds us. When, as the football coach Bill Walsh explained, “self-confidence becomes arrogance, assertiveness becomes obstinacy, and self-assurance becomes reckless abandon.” This is the ego, as the writer Cyril Connolly warned, that “sucks us down like the law of gravity.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." - "Meglio scrivere per se stessi e non avere un pubblico piuttosto che scrivere per gli altri e non essere se stessi".

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. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it, or having drawn the conclusion, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked! Writers always hope that their next book is going to be their best, and will not acknowledge that they are prevented by their present way of life from ever creating anything different.

Twain had it too and Alexander Woollcott. Stephen Spender and Barbara Skelton insisted Cyril Connolly had it, on rare occasions, when the word for it was “magnificent,” but I only heard faint echoes of this gigantic gift. Sir Isaiah Berlin had it, and I heard him: but the trouble was, once he got really going on a line of fantastic humor, he began to speak so fast, and his accent became so impenetrable, that the sense wasdifficult to grasp, though his evident delight in his fun was so furious that you laughed all the same.

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.

Popular success is a palace built for a writer by publishers, journalists, admirers, and professional reputation makers, in which a silent army of termites, rats, dry rot, and death-watch beetles are tunnelling away, till, at the very moment of completion, it is ready to fall down.

Two fears alternate in marriage, of loneliness and of bondage. The dread of loneliness being keener than the fear of bondage, we get married. For one person who fears being thus tied there are four who dread being set free. Yet the love of liberty is a noble passion and one to which most married people secretly aspire, -- in moments when they are not neurotically dependent -- but by then it is too late; the ox does not become a bull, not the hen a falcon. The fear of loneliness can be overcome, for it springs from weakness; human beings are intended to be free, and to be free is to be lonely, but the fear of bondage is the apprehension of a real danger, and so I find it all the more pathetic to watch young men and beautiful girls taking refuge in marriage from an imaginary danger, a sad loss to their friends ad a sore trial to each other. First love is the one most worth having, yet the best marriage is often the second, for we should marry only when the desire for freedom be spent; not till then does a man know whether he is the kind who can settle down. The most tragic breakings-up are of those couples who have married young and who have enjoyed seven years of happiness, after which the banked fires of passion and independence explode -- and without knowing why, for they still love each other, they set about accomplishing their common destruction.

When once we have discovered how pain and suffering diminish the personality and how joy alone increases it, then the morbid attraction which is felt for evil, pain and abnormality will have lost its power. Why do we reward our men of genius, our suicides, our madmen and the generally maladjusted with the melancholy honours of a posthumous curiosity? Because we know that it is our society which has condemned these men to death and which is guilty because, out of its own ignorance and malformation, it has persecuted those who were potential saviours; smiters of the rock who might have touched the spring of healing and brought us back into harmony with ourselves. Somehow, then, and without going mad, we must learn from these madmen to reconcile fanaticism with serenity. Either one, taken alone, is disastrous, yet except through the integration of these two opposites there can be no great art and no profound happiness--and what else is worth having? For nothing can be accomplished without fanaticism and without serenity nothing can be enjoyed.

It's an old chestnut to say that we need to keep challenging ourselves throughout life. Samuel Beckett memorably declared, "Try again. Fail again. Fail better," while T.S. Eliot proclaimed that "Old men ought to be explorers." More bluntly, Cyril Connolly maintained that we should cast aside whatever "piece of iridescent mediocrity" we are wasting our time with and get down to creating a masterpiece.

Happiness is in the imagination. What we perform is always inferior to what we imagine.

Meglio scrivere per se stessi e non avere un pubblico, che scrivere per il pubblico e non avere se stessi.

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

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. ― Cyril Connolly Even though I write for myself, however, I live and breathe within the public; therefore, escaping from it may fail since I'm also a part of that. ― Ehsan Sehgal

La Conspiración Vegetal: El Hombre está ahora en guardia ante los insectos parasitarios; ante tenias, termitas, escarabajos, pero ¿ha prestado alguna atención a la posibilidad de que haya sido elegido como objetivo del ataque vegetal, señalado por la viña, el lúpulo, el enebro, la planta del tabaco, la hoja de té y el grano de café para ser destruido?

Книги, не написанные мной, лучше, чем книги, написанные другими.

There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say,” Cyril Connolly once joked.

Contemporary books do not keep. The quality in them which makes for their success is the first to go; they turn over night. – Cyril Connolly

In the sex-war thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female. —CYRIL CONNOLLY

There was once a man (reputed to be the wisest in the world) who, although living to an untold age, confined his teaching to the one word of advice: ‘Endure!’ At length a rival arose and challenged him to a debate which took place before a large assembly. ‘You say “Endure”,’ cried the rival sage, ‘but I don’t want to endure. I wish to love and to be loved, to conquer and create, I wish to know what is right, then do it and be happy.’ There was no reply from his opponent, and, on looking more closely at the old creature, his adversary found him to consist of an odd-shaped rock on which had taken root a battered thorn that presented, by an optical illusion, the impression of hair and a beard. Trimnphantly he pointed out the mistake to the authorities, but they were not concerned. ‘Man or rock,’ they answered, ‘what does it matter?’ And at that moment the wind, reverberating through the sage’s moss-grown orifice, repeated with a hollow sound: ‘Endure!

* Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. Cyril Connolly * Even though I write for myself; however, I live and breathe, within the public; therefore, escape from it, may fail since as I'm also a part of that. Ehsan Sehgal

One of Connolly’s lasting contribution to the debate is a one-word designation for prose that does not strive for the classical virtues of simplicity and clarity. He called it Mandarin. .... Connolly describes the Mandarin style’s reign in the nineteenth century, when its “last great exponents” were Pater and Henry James, and he has a plausible explanation for why James’s late novels, with their tortuous sentences and endless strings of metaphors, went virtually unread. James’s early works reached a small leisured collection of people for whom reading a book—usually aloud—was one of the few diversions of our northern winters. The longer a book could be spun out the better, and it was the duty of the author to spin it. But books got cheaper, and reading them ceased to be a luxury, the reading public multiplied and demanded less exacting entertainment, the struggle between literature and journalism began. Literature is the art of writing something that can be read twice; journalism what will be read once, and they demand different techniques. There can be no delayed impact in journalism, no subtlety, no embellishment, no assumption of a luxury reader, and since the pace of journalism is faster than that of literature, literature found itself in a predicament. It could react against journalism and become an esoteric art depending on the sympathy of a few, or learn from journalism, and compete with it.

* Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. Cyril Connolly * Even though I write for myself; however, I live and breathe within the public; therefore, escape from it, may fail since as I'm also a part of that. Ehsan Sehgal

Thus tea, coffee, alcohol stimulate. 　So do heights, wet days, south-west gales, hotel bedrooms in Paris and windows overlooking harbours. Also snow, frost, the electric bell outside a cinema at night, sex-life and fever.