Cyril Connolly People Quotations

All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.

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.

Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.

The books I haven't written are better than the books other people have.

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.

We may assume that we keep people waiting symbolically because we do not wish to see them and that our anxiety is due not to being late, but to having to see them at all.

Promise is the capacity for letting people down.

Failure on the other hand is infectious. The world is full of charming failures (for all charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others) and unless the writer is quite ruthless with these amiable footlers, they will drag him down with them.

Two weeks before his death, a friend asked him half jokingly if he had discovered any meaning in life. "Yes," he replied, "there is a meaning; at least, for me, there is one thing that matters - to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people."