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
men fats thin-man
Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.
nature men literature
Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.
men years garbage-cans
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?
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.
passion men slave
The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.
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?
new-york men economic
That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.
morning men cities
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
health character men
The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.
life fear publishing-books
As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
weed lying flower
A stone lies in a river; a piece of wood is jammed against it; dead leaves, drifting logs, and branches caked with mud collect; weeds settle there, and soon birds have made a nest and are feeding their young among the blossoming water plants. Then the river rises and the earth is washed away. The birds depart, the flowers wither, the branches are dislodged and drift downward; no trace is left of the floating island but a stone submerged by the water; - such is our personality.
call gods whom
Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first call promising.
art grasped journalism literature
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once
artist closing gardens judged quality resonance solitude time west
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.