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
pain golden-moments pleasure
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.
love-is essentials elation
It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
lasts firsts miserable
Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.
country mistake character
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.
made brothels wretched
No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
veins lessons
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.
fall men eden
The Expulsion from Eden is an act of vindictive womanish spite; the Fall of Man, as recounted in the Bible, comes nearer to the Fall of God.
survival language flux
The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.
art blow noses
He [George Orwell] would not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.
movement scandal publicity
An aesthetic movement with a revolutionary dynamism and no popular appeal should proceed quite otherwise than by public scandal, publicity stunt, noisy expulsion and excommunication.
writing years promise
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.
peace war morbid
Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.
sick misery forget
It is a consolation of human life that the sick forget what it is like to feel well, or the miserable to be happy.
running taken air
The only happy talkers are dandies who extract pleasure from the very perishability of their material and who would not be able to tolerate the isolation of all other forms of composition; for most good talkers, when they have run down, are miserable; they know that they have betrayed themselves, that they have taken material which should have a life of its own, to dispense it in noises upon the air.