239 Quotes by Cyril Connolly

From now on - specialize; never again make any concession to the ninety-nine percent of you which is like everyon else at the expense of the one percent which is unique.

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

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

What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?

There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall

Only by avoiding the beginning of things can we escape their end.

In the dream of approaching forty I saw myself as about to die and realized that I was no longer myself, but a creature inhabited entirely by parasites, as a caterpillar is occupied by the grubs of the ichneumon fly. Gin, whisky, sloth, fear, guilt, tobacco, had made themselves my inquilines; alcohol sloshed about within, while tendrils of melon and vine grew out of ears and nostrils; my mind was a worn gramophone record, my true self was such a ruin as to seem non-existent, and all this had happened in the last three years.

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

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