Beneath this mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivilous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit ridden, I let it reform.

— Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly Quotes

Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.

— Cyril Connolly

Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.

— Cyril Connolly

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

— Cyril Connolly

Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.

— Cyril Connolly

Except for poverty, incompatibility, opposition of parents, absence of love on one side and of desire to marry on both, nothing stands in the way of our happy union.

— Cyril Connolly

Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.

— Cyril Connolly

There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.

— Cyril Connolly

Two weeks before his death, a friend asked him half jokingly if he had discovered any meaning in life. “Yes,” he replied, “there is a meaning; at least, for me, there is one thing that matters – to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.”

— Cyril Connolly

There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another.

— Cyril Connolly

English Law: where there are two alternatives: one intelligent, one stupid; one attractive, one vulgar; one noble, one ape-like; one serious and sincere, one undignified and false; one far-sighted, one short; EVERYBODY will INVARIABLY choose the latter.

— Cyril Connolly

Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment.

— Cyril Connolly

We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.

— Cyril Connolly

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.

— Cyril Connolly

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.

— Cyril Connolly

It is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.

— Cyril Connolly

There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union.

— Cyril Connolly

He felt old and miserable, going through life trying to peddle a personality of which people would not even accept a free sample.

— Cyril Connolly

I am now forced to admit that anxiety is my true condition, occasionally intruded on by work, pleasure, melancholy or despair.

— Cyril Connolly

Like many lazy people, once I started work I could not stop; perhaps that is why we avoid it.

— Cyril Connolly

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”.

— Cyril Connolly
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