Cyril Connolly Quotes

"It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book."

"Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual."

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

"The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence."

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

"In America every woman has her set of girl-friends; some are cousins, the rest are gained at school. These form a permanent committee who sit on each other's affairs, who ''come out'' together, marry and divorce together, and who end as those groups of bustling, heartless well-informed club-women who govern society. Against them the Couple of Ehepaar is helpless and Man in their eyes but a biological interlude."