Quotes by Cyril Connolly

A life based on reason will always require to be balanced by an occasional bout of violent and irrational emotion for the instinctual tribes must be satisfied.

The man who is master of his passions is Reasons slave.

We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of self.

In the sex-war thoughtlessness is a weapon of the male vindictiveness of the female. Both are reciprocally generated but a womans desire for revenge outlasts all other emotion. Yet when every unkind word about women has been said we have still to admit with Byron that they are nicer than men. They are more devoted more unselfish and more emotionally sincere. When the long fuse of cruelty deceit and revenge is set alight it is male thoughtlessness which has fired it.

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

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 mans 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.

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.

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

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