Cyril Connolly
Cyril Connolly
Cyril Vernon Connollywas a literary critic and writer. He was the editor of the influential literary magazine Horizonand wrote Enemies of Promise, which combined literary criticism with an autobiographical exploration of why he failed to become the successful author of fiction that he had aspired to be in his youth...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth10 September 1903
travel past years
A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious retreat of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.
nature ideas gains
The more I see of life the more I perceive that only through solitary communion with nature can one gain an idea of its richness and meaning.
eye facts tomorrow
Carelessness is not fatal to journalism, nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once; a journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow.
writing style language
An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.
artist nostalgia
The artist secretes nostalgia around life.
dresses belief crabs
Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
vices worship worst
The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
water tranquility repose
Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.
men years garbage-cans
When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?
mind quality taste
No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.
dating suffering bees
Like the bee its sting, the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer.
sadness reality wind
Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.
self optimism negative
Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.
lonely fear loneliness
The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.