Cyril Connolly

A best-seller is the golden touch of mediocre talent.

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

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed we wear belief and custom.

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

A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.

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

Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment.

While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.

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

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

There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another.

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

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

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

All charming people have something to conceal usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.

Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.

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

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

We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.

There is no fury like an ex wife searching for a new lover.

The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.

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.

Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.

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

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

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

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

Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.

All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.

Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.

Friendships that last are those wherein each friend respects the others dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from them.

We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.

Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.

Translating from one language to another is the most delicate of intellectual exercises; compared to translation, all other puzzles, from bridge to crosswords, seem trivial and vulgar. To take a piece of Greek and put it in English without spilling a drop; what a nice skill!

Youth is a period of missed opportunities.

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.

Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.

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

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

The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the others dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.

When we have ceased to love the stench of the human animal, either in others or in ourselves, then are we condemned to misery, and clear thinking can begin.

Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.

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

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

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

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

One way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.

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

As bees their sting, so the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer.

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.

Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

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

A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he starts out, have condemned himself to second-rate thoughts, and to second-rate friends.

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

When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.

For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

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

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life.

No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.

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

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.

The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.

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

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

Egotism sucks us down like the law of gravity.