Quotes by Cyril Connolly

“Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree”

“The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.”

“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”

“The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean”

“What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.”

“Every mans memory is his private literature.”

“The crown of literature is poetry.”

“Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.”

“There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature.”

“Forgiveness is the sweetest revenge.”

“To a woman in love, loving too much is not loving enough”

“People who matter are most aware that everyone else does, too.”

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.

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

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 this spell over your beer it will go flat,’ we should remain incredulous and Paracelsus, the Alchemists, Aleister Crowley and all the Magi have lived in vain. Yet when I read science I turn magical; when I study magic, scientific.

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 who dread being set free. Yet the love of liberty is a noble passion and one to which most married people secretly aspire, -- in moments when they are not neurotically dependent -- but by then it is too late; the ox does not become a bull, not the hen a falcon.The fear of loneliness can be overcome, for it springs from weakness; human beings are intended to be free, and to be free is to be lonely, but the fear of bondage is the apprehension of a real danger, and so I find it all the more pathetic to watch young men and beautiful girls taking refuge in marriage from an imaginary danger, a sad loss to their friends ad a sore trial to each other. First love is the one most worth having, yet the best marriage is often the second, for we should marry only when the desire for freedom be spent; not till then does a man know whether he is the kind who can settle down. The most tragic breakings-up are of those couples who have married young and who have enjoyed seven years of happiness, after which the banked fires of passion and independence explode -- and without knowing why, for they still love each other, they set about accomplishing their common destruction.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. - Meglio scrivere per se stessi e non avere un pubblico piuttosto che scrivere per gli altri e non essere se stessi.

Youth is a period of missed opportunities.