239 Quotes by Cyril Connolly

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

We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.

No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, - something more than we could learn ourselves, from a book

Melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality; we run aground sooner than the flat-bottomed pleasure-lovers but we venture out in weather that would sink them and we choose our direction.

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

The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.

A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious retreat of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.

There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives.

Promise is the capacity for letting people down.