Quote

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.

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
Twice
Journalist
Journalism
Literature
Read
Art
Writing
Something
Grasped

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

Image
The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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?
Cyril Connolly
Image
The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.
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
Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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
Image
There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
Cyril Connolly
Image
What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?
Cyril Connolly
Image
Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
Cyril Connolly
Image
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.
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