Quote

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

Cyril Connolly

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Cyril Connolly
Age: 71 †
Born: 1903
Born: September 10
Died: 1974
Died: November 26
Critic
Literary Critic
Novelist
Writer
Coventry
England
UK
Cyril Vernon Connolly
Supposed
Literature
Sadists
Fear
Butchers
Become
Repressed
Life
Policemen
Publishers
Publishing
Irrational

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

Image
Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The lesson one can learn from Firbank is that of inconsequence. There is the vein which he tapped and which has not yet been fully exploited.
Cyril Connolly
Image
No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Sheep with a nasty side.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Industrial society seems likely to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems
Cyril Connolly
Image
There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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.
Cyril Connolly
Image
No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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.
Cyril Connolly
Image
We fear something before we hate.
Cyril Connolly
Image
In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
Cyril Connolly
Image
In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Beautiful women must think about their beauty as capitalists think about their investments or politicians about their majorities it is all they have to insure their places in the world.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.
Cyril Connolly