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
dresses belief crabs
Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
men perfect unions
In a perfect union the man and woman are like a strung bow. Who is to say whether the string bends the bow, or the bow tightens the string?
people waiting anxiety
We may assume that we keep people waiting symbolically because we do not wish to see them and that our anxiety is due not to being late, but to having to see them at all.
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.
morning lying night
If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.
writing dark purple
When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
unique ninety-nine advice
From now on - specialize; never again make any concession to the ninety-nine percent of you which is like everyon else at the expense of the one percent which is unique.
wine sun taught
What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?
ends avoiding
Only by avoiding the beginning of things can we escape their end.
dream self years
In the dream of approaching forty I saw myself as about to die and realized that I was no longer myself, but a creature inhabited entirely by parasites, as a caterpillar is occupied by the grubs of the ichneumon fly. Gin, whisky, sloth, fear, guilt, tobacco, had made themselves my inquilines; alcohol sloshed about within, while tendrils of melon and vine grew out of ears and nostrils; my mind was a worn gramophone record, my true self was such a ruin as to seem non-existent, and all this had happened in the last three years.
beach art genius
The true work of art is the one which the seventh wave of genius throws up the beach where the undertow of time cannot drag it back.
artist imagination today
Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.