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

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.
- Cyril Connolly Quote

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

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

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
- Cyril Connolly Quote

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.
- Cyril Connolly Quote

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

For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
- Cyril Connolly Quote

Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
- Cyril Connolly Quote

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

Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
- Cyril Connolly Quote

Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.
- Cyril Connolly Quote

In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.
- Cyril Connolly Quote

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.
- Cyril Connolly Quote

It is only in the country that we can get to know a fellow-being or a book.
- Cyril Connolly Quote

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

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

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

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

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

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

The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
- Cyril Connolly Quote

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
- Cyril Connolly Quote

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.
- Cyril Connolly Quote

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

The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.
- Cyril Connolly Quote

The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
- Cyril Connolly Quote

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

There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
- Cyril Connolly Quote

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life.
- Cyril Connolly Quote

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

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.
- Cyril Connolly Quote

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

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.
- Cyril Connolly Quote