Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

Cyril Connolly Novelist

  • Gender: Male
  • Citizenship: United Kingdom
  • Born: Sep 10, 1903
  • Died: Nov 26, 1974

Cyril Vernon Connolly was a literary critic and writer. He was the editor of the influential literary magazine Horizon and wrote Enemies of Promise, which combined literary criticism with an autobiographical exploration of why he failed to become the successful author of fiction that he had aspired to be in his youth.

Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.

We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.

The dread of lonliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.

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

It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.

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

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

In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.

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

The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.

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

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

Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.

The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.