Cyril Vernon Connolly citáty

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„Ten, kto ovláda svoje vášne, je otrokom rozumu.“

„Literatúra je umenie napísať niečo, čo sa prečíta dvakrát; žurnalistika to, čo sa prečíta raz.“

„Všetci očarujúci ľudia musia niečo skrývať, obyčajne svoju úplnú závislosť od ocenenia druhých.“

„Vo vojne pohlaví je zbraňou muža bezstarostnosť, zbraňou ženy pomstychtivosť.“

„Všetci si odpykávame rozsudok na doživotie vo väzení nášho vlastného ja.“

„Koho chcú bohovia zničiť, toho najprv prehlásia za sľubný talent.“

„Niet väčšej zúrivosti ako v žene, ktorá hľadá nového milenca.“

„Vulgárnosť je cesnak v šaláte dobrého vkusu.“

„Tak, ako sa predpokladá, že ľudia trpiaci potlačeným sadizmom sa stanú policajtmi alebo mäsiarmi, tí čo majú iracionálny strach zo života, sa stanú vydavateľmi.“

„Život je bludisko, keď zabočíte zlým smerom ešte skôr, ako sme sa naučili chodiť.“

“He reduced everything to politics; he was also unalterably of the Left. His line may have been unpopular or unfashionable, but he followed it unhesitatingly; in fact it was an obsession. He could not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.”

“We write in the language of Dryden and Addison, of Milton and Shakespeare, but the intellectual world we inhabit is that of Flaubert and Baudelaire; it is to them, and not to their English contemporaries, that we owe our conception of modern life. The artist whose reward is perfection and where perfection can be obtained only by a separation of standards from those of the non-artist is led to adopt one of four rôles: the High Priest (Mallarmé, Joyce, Yeats), the Dandy (Firbank, Beerbohm, Moore), the Incorruptible Observer (Maugham, Maupassant) or the Detached Philosopher (Strachey, Anatole France). What he will not be is a Fighter or Helper.”

“Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.”

“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.”

“There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.”

“Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.”

“Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.”

“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”

“There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.”

“Destroy him as you will, the bourgeois always bounces up — execute him, expropriate him, starve him out en masse, and he reappears in your children.”

“I greet you, my educated fellow bourgeois, whose interests and whose doubts I share.”

“It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.”

“Everything is a dangerous drug to me except reality, which is unendurable.”

“The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.”

“Popular success is a palace built for a writer by publishers, journalists, admirers and professional reputation makers, in which a silent army of termites, rats, dry rot and death-watch beetles are tunnelling away, till, at the very moment of completion, it is ready to fall down. The one hope for a writer is that although his enemies are often unseen they are seldom unheard. He must listen for the death-watch, listen for the faint toc-toc, the critic's truth sharpened by envy, the embarrassed praise of a sincere friend, the silence of gifted contemporaries, the implications of the don in the manger, the visitor in the small hours. He must dismiss the builders and contractors, elude the fans with an assumed name and dark glasses, force his way off the moving staircase, subject every thing he writes to a supreme critical court. Would it amuse Horace or Milton or Swift or Leopardi? Could it be read to Flaubert? Would it be chosen by the Infallible Worm, by the discriminating palates of the dead?”

“Peace … is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.”

“Dry again?”

“The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.”