Quote

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

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
Writer
Stupid
Firsts
Severe
First
Discovering
Time
Shock
Think
Stupidity
Thinking
Younger
People
Intelligent

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
A woman's desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.
Cyril Connolly
Image
We create the world in which we live if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.
Cyril Connolly
Image
English Law: where there are two alternatives: one intelligent, one stupid one attractive, one vulgar one noble, one ape-like one serious and sincere, one undignified and false one far-sighted, one short EVERYBODY will INVARIABLY choose the latter.
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
An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.
Cyril Connolly
Image
I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
Cyril Connolly
Image
When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.
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
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
No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.
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
The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
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
When we have ceased to love the stench of the human animal, either in others or in ourselves, then are we condemned to misery, and clear thinking can begin.
Cyril Connolly
Image
There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another.
Cyril Connolly