Quotes of Cyril Connolly - somelinesforyou

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

- Cyril Connolly

“ All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others. ”

- Cyril Connolly

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

- Cyril Connolly

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

- Cyril Connolly

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

- Cyril Connolly

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

- Cyril Connolly

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

- Cyril Connolly

“ Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose. ”

- Cyril Connolly

“ Egotism sucks us down like the law of gravity. ”

- Cyril Connolly

“ Egotism sucks us down like the law of gravity. ”

- Cyril Connolly

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

- Cyril Connolly

“ 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] ”

- Cyril Connolly

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

- Cyril Connolly

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

- Cyril Connolly

“ 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. ”

- Cyril Connolly

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

- Cyril Connolly

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

- Cyril Connolly

“ We must select the Illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy. ”

- Cyril Connolly

“ 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… ”

- Cyril Connolly

“ A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends. ”

- Cyril Connolly

“ Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear. ”

- Cyril Connolly

“ Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the present with the past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Pres: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past. ”

- Cyril Connolly

“ The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post. ”

- Cyril Connolly

“ The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post. ”

- Cyril Connolly

“ The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence. ”

- Cyril Connolly

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

- Cyril Connolly

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

- Cyril Connolly

“ Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster. ”

- Cyril Connolly

“ A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends. ”

- Cyril Connolly

“ Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether. ”

- Cyril Connolly
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