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There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.

Cyril Connolly

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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
Atheism
Enemy
Literature
Pram
Art
Prams
Good
Sombre
Somber
Hall
Halls

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Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.
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Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.
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The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.
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Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be discovered.
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There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.
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Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
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Happiness lies in the fulfillment of the spirit through the body.
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The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.
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The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
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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.
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Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.
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Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.
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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.
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Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.
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Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.
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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.
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We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
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Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
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A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious retreat of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.
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Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
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