Cyril Connolly Quotes

When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

I watched 'Fame,' and I just love the choreography. It just gives me a place to be in another zone.

One of the great things about books is you can afford to do anything.

Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

Art is running away without ever leaving home.

Prose is walking; poetry is flying

Language is the machine of the poet.

There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen.

As artists, we like night more than day sometimes.

I always felt that acting was an escape, like having the secret key to every door and permission to go into any realm and soak it up. I enjoy that free pass.

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.

If I see a great performance on television, onstage, in the movies, I go to work the next day with a renewed energy and less fear. These great artists take me out of my life and make me want to go there.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

Music is not simply an orchestration of something, but it's also not something as trivial as honesty.

I love to create, and to me, the ultimate freedom of expression is a blank canvas or a block of clay to capture whatever emotions your imagination gives it.

Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

From my perspective, music allows me to escape from the world of what is happening right in front of me... to the world of my thoughts, my dreams, my hopes and ideas - for the world, for my own life, for the day, even for the moment.

The theater, for me, has always been a place where I'm free to be more creative, a place to sharpen my tools.

Art is not only about angst.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes I feel like playing 'Hospital'. Sometimes I feel like playing 'Pablo Picasso'. I've been playing a lot lately. I do it as long as I feel like it.

Creativity is the greatest expression of liberty.