Quotes by Cyril Connolly

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.", February 25, 1933]”

“When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.”

“Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.”

“It is significant comment on the victory of science over magic that were someone to say if I put this pill in your beer it will explode, we might believe them; but were they to cry if I pronounce t...”

“Two fears alternate in marriage, of loneliness and of bondage. The dread of loneliness being keener than the fear of bondage, we get married. For one person who fears being thus tied there are four...”

“Youth is a period of missed opportunities.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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 laughi...”

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