"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
"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." ~Cyril Connolly
"All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others." ~Cyril Connolly
"Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you." ~Cyril Connolly
"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
"Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature." ~Cyril Connolly
"Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph—green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree." ~Cyril Connolly
"Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out." ~Cyril Connolly
"In the sex-war thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female. Both are reciprocally generated, but a woman's desire for revenge outlasts all other emotion." ~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
"Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose." ~Cyril Connolly
"Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once." ~Cyril Connolly
"No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning." ~Cyril Connolly
"The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck." ~Cyril Connolly
"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." ~Cyril Connolly
"The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up." ~Cyril Connolly
"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
"The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife." ~Cyril Connolly
"The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food." ~Cyril Connolly
"Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action." ~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
"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 lustre." ~Cyril Connolly (1903-1974), British critic.
