Cyril Connolly - Quotes

Quotes

Connolly coined many witty epithets and insightful observations, which have been extensively quoted. A few of his best known quotes are listed:

• "Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."
• "Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but the middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium."
• "No city should be so large that a man cannot walk out of it in a morning."
• "Inside every fat man, there is a thin man struggling to get out."
• "We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy."
• "Truth is a river that is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between the arms, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the main river."
• "There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall."
• "A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he starts forth, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts, and to second-rate friends."
• "Perfect taste always implies an insolent dismissal of other people's."
• "We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self."
• "Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turn before we have learnt to walk."