Zitat des Tages von Cyril Connolly:
As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
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.
Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
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.
All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.
The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.
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.
It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.
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.
Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.
The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.
Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
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.
Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.
Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.
Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life.
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
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.
Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.
The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
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.
When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.
There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives.
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.
No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.