239 Quotes by Cyril Connolly

Flaubert spoke true: to succeed a great artist must have both character and fanaticism and few in this country are willing to pay the price. Our writers have either no personality and therefore no style or a false personality and therefore a bad style; they mistake prejudice for energy and accept the sensation of material well-being as a system of thought.

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.

Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.

Nothing dates like hate and in literature a little of it goes a very long way.

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.

The artist secretes nostalgia around life.

Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.

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