Cyril Connolly Quotes

A romantic interest in our own sex, not necessarily carried as far as physical experiments, was the intellectual fashion.

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.

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

We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self.

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

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

The disasters of the world are due to its inhabitants not being able to grow old simultaneously.

The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

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

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

In the sex war thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.

There is no fury like an ex-wife looking for a new lover.

The more books we read, the sooner we perceive that the only function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece. No other task is of any consequence.

Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence.

I have called this style the Mandarin style… It is the style of 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.

A private school has all the faults of a public school without any of its compensations.

Humorists are not happy men. Like Beachcomber or Saki or Thurber they burn while Rome fiddles.

I should like to see the custom introduced of readers who are pleased with a book sending the author some small cash token… Not more than a hundred pounds—that would be bad for my character—not less than half a crown—that would do no good to yours.

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.