Cyril Connolly Quotes (49 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Enemies of Promise

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly: 49 quotes 3 likes

Famous Cyril Connolly Quotes

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

Cyril Connolly

The New Statesman (1933-02-25)

“It is by a blend of lively curiosity and intelligent selfishness that the artists who wish to mature late, who feel too old to die, the Goethes, Tolstoys, Voltaires, Titians and Verdis, reach a fruitful senescence. They cannot afford to associate with those who are burning themselves up or preparing for a tragedy or whom melancholy has marked for her own. Not for them the accident-prone, the friend in whom the desire for self-destruction keeps blistering out in broken legs or threatening them in anxiety-neuroses. Not for them the drumming finger, the close-cropt nail, the chewed glasses, the pause on the threshold, the wandering eye, or the repeated ‘um’ and ‘er.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 2: The Charlock’s Shade, Ch. 16: Outlook Unsettled (p. 137)

“Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.”

Cyril Connolly book The Unquiet Grave

Part II: Te Palinure Petens (p. 70)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)

“Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 2: The Charlock’s Shade, Ch. 13: The Poppies (p. 109-110)
Context: Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.
Young writers if they are to mature require a period of between three and seven years in which to live down their promise. Promise is like the mediaeval hangman who after settling the noose, pushed his victim off the platform and jumped on his back, his weight acting a drop while his jockeying arms prevented the unfortunate from loosening the rope. When he judged him dead he dropped to the ground.

“… art is made by the alone for the alone… The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication…”

Cyril Connolly

Source: The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.”

Cyril Connolly

Source: The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

Cyril Connolly Quotes about art

“Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 1: Predicament, Ch. 3: The Challenge of the Mandarins (p. 19)

“So wrote Pater, calling an art-for-art's sake muezzin to the faithful from the topmost turret of the ivory tower.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 1: Predicament, Ch. 5: Anatomy of Dandyism (p. 37)

“You imply our education is of no use to you in after life. But no education is. We are not an employment agency; all we can do is to give you a grounding in the art of mixing with your fellow men, to tell you what to expect from life and give you an outward manner and inward poise, an old prescription from the eighteenth century which we call a classical education, an education which confers the infrequent virtues of good sense and good taste and the benefit of dual nationality, English and Mediterranean, and which, taking into account the difficulties of modern life, we find the philosophy best able to overcome them.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 3: A Georgian Boyhood, Ch. 24: Vale (p. 258)

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

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 2: The Charlock’s Shade, Ch. 14: The Charlock’s Shade (p. 116)

“The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.”

Cyril Connolly book The Unquiet Grave

Part II: Te Palinure Petens
The Unquiet Grave (1944)

Cyril Connolly Quotes about life

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

Cyril Connolly book The Unquiet Grave

Part I: Ecce Gubernator (p. 23)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)

“We write in the language of Dryden and Addison, of Milton and Shakespeare, but the intellectual world we inhabit is that of Flaubert and Baudelaire; it is to them, and not to their English contemporaries, that we owe our conception of modern life. The artist whose reward is perfection and where perfection can be obtained only by a separation of standards from those of the non-artist is led to adopt one of four rôles: the High Priest (Mallarmé, Joyce, Yeats), the Dandy (Firbank, Beerbohm, Moore), the Incorruptible Observer (Maugham, Maupassant) or the Detached Philosopher (Strachey, Anatole France). What he will not be is a Fighter or Helper.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 1: Predicament, Ch. 4: The Modern Movement (p. 30)

“No education is worth having that does not teach the lesson of concentration on a task, however unattractive. These lessons, if not learnt early, will be learnt, if at all, with pain and grief in later life.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 3: A Georgian Boyhood, Ch. 24: Vale (p. 259)

Cyril Connolly Quotes

“The Mandarin style at its best yields the richest and most complete expression of the English language.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 1: Predicament, Ch. 3: The Challenge to the Mandarins (p. 17-18)
Context: The Mandarin style at its best yields the richest and most complete expression of the English language. It is the diction of Donne, Browne, Addison, Johnson, Gibbon, de Quincey, Landor, Carlyle and Ruskin as opposed to that of Bunyan, Dryden, Locke, Defoe, Cowper, Cobbett, Hazlitt, Southey and Newman. It is characterized by long sentences with many dependent clauses, by the use of the subjunctive and conditional, by exclamations and interjections, quotations, allusions, metaphors, long images, Latin terminology, subtlety and conceits. Its cardinal assumption is that neither the writer nor the reader is in a hurry, that both are possessed of a classical education and a private income. It is Ciceronian English.

“A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting.”

Cyril Connolly book The Unquiet Grave

Part II: Te Palinure Petens (p.64)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)
Context: A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossed with oneself, malignant or ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality. Neurotics are heartless.

“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.”

Cyril Connolly book The Unquiet Grave

Part III: La Clé des Chants (p. 98)
Variant: Truth is a river that is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between the arms, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the main river.
As quoted in The International Thesaurus of Quotations (1970) compiled by Rhoda Thomas Tripp. This version has also appeared in earlier published sources, but it may be a misquotation.
The Unquiet Grave (1944)
Context: Ridiculous as may seem the dualities of conflict at a given time, it does not follow that dualism is a worthless process. 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.

Truth

“There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.”

Cyril Connolly book The Unquiet Grave

Part III: La Clé des Chants (p.103)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)
Context: There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, our popularity, our vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may be able to cease from hating. Analyse in this way the hatred of ideas or of the kind of people whom we have once loved and whose faces are preserved in Spirits of Anger. Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate; a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.

Hate , Fear

“Its cardinal assumption is that neither the writer nor the reader is in a hurry, that both are possessed of a classical education and a private income. It is Ciceronian English.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Education

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

Cyril Connolly book The Unquiet Grave

Hate , Fear

“Flaubert spoke true: to succeed a great artist must have both character and fanaticism and few in this country are willing to pay the price.”

Cyril Connolly book The Unquiet Grave

Part III: La Clé des Chants (p. 93)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)
Context: Flaubert spoke true: to succeed a great artist must have both character and fanaticism and few in this country are willing to pay the price. Our writers have either no personality and therefore no style or a false personality and therefore a bad style; they mistake prejudice for energy and accept the sensation of material well-being as a system of thought.

Country

“The birds depart, the flowers wither, the branches are dislodged and drift downward; no trace is left of the floating island but a stone submerged by the water; — such is our personality.”

Cyril Connolly book The Unquiet Grave

Part I: Ecce Gubernator (p. 20)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)
Context: A stone lies in a river; a piece of wood is jammed against it; dead leaves, drifting logs, and branches caked with mud collect; weeds settle there, and soon birds have made a nest and are feeding their young among the blossoming water plants. Then the river rises and the earth is washed away. The birds depart, the flowers wither, the branches are dislodged and drift downward; no trace is left of the floating island but a stone submerged by the water; — such is our personality.

Flowers , Bird , Water , Personality

“Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.”

Cyril Connolly book The Unquiet Grave

Part II: Te Palinure Petens (p. 58)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)

“The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.”

Cyril Connolly book The Unquiet Grave

Part I: Ecce Gubernator (p. 17)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)

Friendship

“The refractory pupil of Socrates, Aristippus the Cyrene, who believed happiness to be the sum of particular pleasures and golden moments and not, as Epicurus, a prolonged intermediary state between ecstasy and pain.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 1: Predicament, Ch. 5: Anatomy of Dandyism (p.38)

Pain , Pleasure , Happiness

“To this period [age seven] I trace my worst faults. Indecision, for I found that by hesitating for a long time over two toys in a shop I would be given both and so was tempted to make two alternatives always seem equally attractive; Ingratitude, for I grew so used to having what I wanted that I assumed it as a right; Laziness, for sloth is the especial vice of tyrants; the Impatience with boredom that is generated by devotion; the Cruelty which comes from a knowledge of power and the Giving way to moods, for I learnt that sulking, crying, moping and malingering were bluffs that paid.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 3: A Georgian Boyhood, Ch. 18: The Branching Ogham (p. 149)

Age , Way , Mood , Knowledge

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

Cyril Connolly book The Unquiet Grave

Part II: Te Palinure Petens (p. 64)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)

For Wife , For Men , Health

“Man axalotl here below but I ask very little. Some fragments of Pamphylides, a Choctaw blood-mask, the prose of Scaliger the Elder, a painting by Fuseli, an occasional visit to the all-in wrestling, or to my meretrix; a cook who can produce a passable 'poulet à la Khmer,' a Pong vase. Simple tastes, you will agree, and it is my simple habit to indulge them!”

Cyril Connolly

"Told in Gath"
The Condemned Playground (1945)

Painting , Cooking

“Melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality; we run aground sooner than the flat-bottomed pleasure-lovers but we venture out in weather that would sink them and we choose our direction.”

Cyril Connolly book The Unquiet Grave

Part III: La Clé des Chants (p.115)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)

Pleasure , Lovers , Reality , Weather

“Dry again?' said the Crab to the Rock-Pool. 'So would you be,' replied the Rock-Pool, 'if you had to satisfy, twice a day, the insatiable sea.”

Cyril Connolly book The Unquiet Grave

Part I: Ecce Gubernator (p. 11)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)

Sea

“Mr. Wilson does not write as one who believes in a particular religion but rather as an intellectual who is being forced more and more into accepting religion as the only solution to the problem of the Outsider. In other words, the anxiety and uneasiness, the sheer horror of being oneself in the modern world is not to be cured by reason or even of study of philosophies which set out to explain them, like Existentialism; the unpleasant symptoms have to be lived through, leading to the worst, in order that the final, mystical experience may be attained. The Outsider has it within him to become a saint. Yet, though Mr. Wilson is drawn to religion, and all his arrows point that way, he never departs from his standards of intellectual analysis.”

Cyril Connolly

'Loser Take All', Sunday Times, p. 5 (27 May 1956)

World , Religion , Way , Problem

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

Cyril Connolly book The Unquiet Grave

Part I: Ecce Gubernator (p. 35)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)

“The lesson one can learn from Firbank is that of inconsequence. There is the vein which he tapped and which has not yet been fully exploited.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 1: Predicament, Ch. 5: Anatomy of Dandyism (p. 36)

Learning

“Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 3: A Georgian Boyhood, Ch. 24: Vale (p. 253)

School , Disappointment , Feeling , Boy

“He reduced everything to politics; he was also unalterably of the Left. His line may have been unpopular or unfashionable, but he followed it unhesitatingly; in fact it was an obsession. He could not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.”

Cyril Connolly

On his friend, George Orwell, in The Sunday Times (1968-09-29); reprinted in The Evening Colonnade (New York, 1973)

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

Cyril Connolly book The Unquiet Grave

Part III: La Clé des Chants (p. 91)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)

Nature , Water

“Failure on the other hand is infectious. The world is full of charming failures (for all charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others) and unless the writer is quite ruthless with these amiable footlers, they will drag him down with them.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 2: The Charlock’s Shade, Ch. 16: Outlook Unsettled (p. 136-137)

People , World , Failure , Dependency

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

Cyril Connolly book The Unquiet Grave

Part II: Te Palinure Petens (p. 62)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)

Fear

“Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.”

Cyril Connolly

"Told in Gath" (a parody of Aldous Huxley)
The Condemned Playground (1945)

“Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.”

Cyril Connolly book The Unquiet Grave

Part I: Ecce Gubernator (p. 6)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)

Dreams , Suffering , Help , Selfishness

“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 1: Predicament, Ch. 2: The Mandarin Dialect (p. 13)

Feeling

“Destroy him as you will, the bourgeois always bounces up — execute him, expropriate him, starve him out en masse, and he reappears in your children.”

Cyril Connolly

The Observer (1937-03-07)

Children

“I greet you, my educated fellow bourgeois, whose interests and whose doubts I share.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 1: Predicament, Ch. 1: The Next Ten Years (p. 5)

Education

“It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 2: The Charlock’s Shade, Ch. 16: Outlook Unsettled (p. 136)

Love , Failure , Success

“Everything is a dangerous drug to me except reality, which is unendurable.”

Cyril Connolly book The Unquiet Grave

Part I: Ecce Gubernator (p. 37)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)

Reality

“The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.”

Cyril Connolly

Edward Thomas, "Early One Morning" from Poems (1917) http://www.richmondreview.co.uk/library/thomas04.html#five
Misattributed

Past , Dead

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 2: The Charlock’s Shade, Ch. 15: The Slimy Mallows (p. 122-123)

Death , Truth , Hope , Way

“Peace … is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.”

Cyril Connolly

"What Will He Do Next?" (a lampoon on military analysis)
The Condemned Playground (1945)

War , Peace

“Dry again?”

Cyril Connolly book The Unquiet Grave

said the Crab to the Rock-Pool. 'So would you be,' replied the Rock-Pool, 'if you had to satisfy, twice a day, the insatiable sea.'
Part I: Ecce Gubernator (p. 11)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)