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
passion past serenity
No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.
suicide creative despair
When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.
suicide responsible
There is no suicide for which all society is not responsible.
love-is essentials elation
It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
appreciation hands people
Failure on the other hand is infectious. The world is full of charming failures (for all charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others) and unless the writer is quite ruthless with these amiable footlers, they will drag him down with them.
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.
education disappointment school
Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.
hate long literature
Nothing dates like hate and in literature a little of it goes a very long way.
artist nostalgia
The artist secretes nostalgia around life.
peace war morbid
Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.
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.
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.
selfish boredom bitterness
Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom.