239 Quotes by Cyril Connolly

The books I haven't written are better than the books other people have.

We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.

Approaching forty, I had a singular dream in which I almost grasped the meaning and understood the nature of what it is that wastes in wasted time.

Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph-green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.

The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.

There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear is lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, popularity, vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may learn to cease from hating. Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noises.

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.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.

Sheep with a nasty side.