Quotes by Connolly, Cyril

"No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, --something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book."

Connolly, Cyril on wisdom   

"The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife."

Connolly, Cyril on wives   

"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."

Connolly, Cyril on words
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"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."

Connolly, Cyril on writers and writing   

"The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence."

Connolly, Cyril on writers and writing
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"When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post."

Connolly, Cyril on writers and writing   

"Youth is a period of missed opportunities."

Connolly, Cyril on youth
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"No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning."

Connolly, Cyril on life   

"Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the present with the past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Pr?s: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past."

Connolly, Cyril on civilization   

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

Connolly, Cyril on civilization   

"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?"

Connolly, Cyril on science   

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

Connolly, Cyril on crime and criminals
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"I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up."

Connolly, Cyril on criticism