Quote

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

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
Matters
Expect
Mistake
Literature
Matter
Work
Good
Expatriates
Exile

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

Image
Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
Cyril Connolly
Image
No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.
Cyril Connolly
Image
That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.
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
Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
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
Image
What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?
Cyril Connolly
Image
The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Sheep with a nasty side.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Hate is the consequence of fear we fear something before we hate a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.
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
The disasters of the world are due to its inhabitants not being able to grow old simultaneously. There is always a raw and intolerant nation eager to destroy the tolerant and mellow.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
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
Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
Cyril Connolly