A best-seller is the golden touch of mediocre talent.
Cyril Connolly

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 lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.
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

As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
Cyril Connolly

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
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

For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
Cyril Connolly


Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
Cyril Connolly

Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.
Cyril Connolly

Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
Cyril Connolly

Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.
Cyril Connolly

In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.
Cyril Connolly

It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.
Cyril Connolly

It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.
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