“A life based on reason will always require to be balanced by an occasional bout of violent and irrational emotion for the instinctual tribes must be satisfied.”
Cyril Connolly“Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.”
Cyril Connolly“The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.”
Cyril Connolly“Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.”
Cyril Connolly“Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.”
Cyril Connolly“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“Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.”
Cyril Connolly“Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.”
Cyril Connolly“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“As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.”
Cyril Connolly