Cyril Connolly Quotes
A best-seller is the golden touch of mediocre talent. A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out. A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends. All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others. Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you. As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers. Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether. Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature. For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act? Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear. Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise. Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present. Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out. In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female. 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. It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book. Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose. Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once. No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
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