Top 100 Quotes About Evelyn Waugh
#1. The charm of your writing," Evelyn Waugh once wrote to Mitford, "depends on your refusal to recognize a distinction between girlish chatter and literary language.
Nancy Mitford
#2. [Evelyn Waugh] made drunkenness cute and chic, and then took to religion, simply to have the most expensive carpet of all to be sick on.
Rebecca West
#3. I don't feel when I'm writing that I'm drawing from any other writer, but of course I must be. The writers I've admired have been not so very different from myself: Evelyn Waugh, for example, that kind of crystalline prose. And I've always admired W. Somerset Maugham more than any other writer.
Charles McCarry
#4. I sometimes think if I had gone to Oxford or Cambridge and looked like a handsome young guy who could be in an Evelyn Waugh novel or something, I'd be a massive movie star. But there's a longevity to what I do. It's more reliable. Someone isn't deciding that I'm the next big thing.
Eddie Marsan
#5. Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh ... he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.
A.S. Byatt
#6. Evelyn Waugh: How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William?
Sir William Beveridge: I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it.
Waugh: I get mine spreading alarm and despondency and I get more satisfaction than you do.
Evelyn Waugh
#7. I think when I was 12, I started reading Evelyn Waugh, and I loved Evelyn Waugh so much, and I thought: 'This is how the world really is. If I could be Evelyn Waugh, then I would be happy.'
Candace Bushnell
#8. The Catholic Church with its foreshortened American history and tangled puritanical roots was as inviolate to my mother and father as it was to the last-ditch aristocrats of Evelyn Waugh.
Maureen Howard
#9. Harcourt sent my book to Evelyn Waugh and his comment was: "If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product." My mother was vastly insulted. She put the emphasis on if and lady. Does he suppose you're not a lady? she says.
Flannery O'Connor
#10. My go-to author for knowing it all is Evelyn Waugh. 'A Handful of Dust' is as perfect as a book can get.
Laurie Graham
#11. A necklace of pearls on a white neck.
We had lost the sense of discovery which had infused the anarchy of our first year. I began to settle down.
... the old house in the foreground, the rest of the world abandoned and forgotten; a world of its own of peace and love and beauty ...
Evelyn Waugh
#12. These memories, which are my life
for we possess nothing certainly except the past
were always with me.
Evelyn Waugh
#13. What is a "canty day", Dennis?'
'I've never troubled to ask. Something like hogmanay, I expect.'
'What is that?'
'People being sick on the pavement in Glasgow.'
'Oh.
Evelyn Waugh
#14. Once you start changing a name, you see, there's no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.
Evelyn Waugh
#15. One can write, think and pray exclusively of others; dreams are all egocentric.
Evelyn Waugh
#17. He took a large tablet of beet sugar (an equivalent quantity of ordinary lump sugar does equally well) and soaked it in Angostura Bitters and then rolled it in Cayenne pepper. This he put into a large glass which he filled up with champagne. The excellences of this drink defy description.
Evelyn Waugh
#18. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to Hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretends it's God and hate that.
Evelyn Waugh
#19. You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.
Evelyn Waugh
#20. It is typical of Oxford, I said, to start the new year in autumn.
Evelyn Waugh
#21. My sister Cordelia's last report said that she was not only the worst girl in the school, but the worst there had ever been in the memory of the oldest nun.
Evelyn Waugh
#22. If a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well.
Evelyn Waugh
#23. O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin,
Evelyn Waugh
#24. If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough there to fill a full lifetime with delight. Venice, with all its complexity and variety, is in itself the greatest surviving work of art in the world.
Evelyn Waugh
#25. It's awful to think that I shall probably never, as long as I live, see you dancing like that again all by yourself.
Evelyn Waugh
#26. There is nothing to be gained by multiplying social distinctions indefinitely.
Evelyn Waugh
#27. I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately of what was in season, drunk fine claret, slept in my own sheets; I shall live long.
Evelyn Waugh
#28. Of children as of procreation
the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable
Evelyn Waugh
#29. Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
Evelyn Waugh
#30. Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?
Evelyn Waugh
#31. We are American at puberty. We die French.
Evelyn Waugh
#32. To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.
Evelyn Waugh
#33. Your colleague, Captain Grimes, has been convicted before me on evidence that leaves no possibility of his innocence - of a crime (I might almost call it a course of action) which I can neither understand nor excuse. I dare say I need not particularise.
Evelyn Waugh
#34. I loved buildings that had grown silently with the centuries, catching the best of each generation while time curbed the artist's pride and the philistine's vulgarity and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman.
Evelyn Waugh
#35. He was fortified by a memory which kept only the good things and rejected the ill. Despite his sorrows, he had had a fair share of joys and these were ever fresh and accessible.
Evelyn Waugh
#36. Its theme
the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters
was perhaps presumptuously large, but I make no apology for it.
Evelyn Waugh
#37. Most writers in the course of their careers become thick-skinned and learn to accept vituperation, which in any other profession would be unimaginably offensive, as a healthy counterpoise to unintelligent praise.
Evelyn Waugh
#38. Free as air; that's what they say- "free as air". Now they bring me my air in an iron barrel.
Evelyn Waugh
#39. There was a regulation that if they remained at large in enemy territory for some weeks longer, they could be repatriated to the United States. It was for this that they had made a hazardous parachute jump and destroyed an expensive, very slightly damaged aeroplane.
Evelyn Waugh
#40. My father greeted me with his usual air of mild regret.
Evelyn Waugh
#42. I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.
Evelyn Waugh
#43. Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of utterance.
Evelyn Waugh
#44. Soon someone would say the fatal words, Well, I think it's time for me to go to bed.
Evelyn Waugh
#45. If only people realized Corbusier is pure nineteenth century, Manchester school utilitarian, and that's why they like him.
Evelyn Waugh
#46. She had regained what I thought she had lost forever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, Surely I was made for some other purpose than this?
Evelyn Waugh
#47. I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason that he is anxious to conceal.
Evelyn Waugh
#48. Remember that, however patient your study, you will never in adult life learn any language perfectly; the best you can hope for is to be a bore.
Evelyn Waugh
#49. Faster ... Faster ... it'll stop all right when the time comes ...
Evelyn Waugh
#50. The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.
Evelyn Waugh
#51. He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.
Evelyn Waugh
#52. I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.
Evelyn Waugh
#53. The audiences certainly have [declined]. If I go to the theatre now I find people come there to eat and smoke and talk to one another. And look like scarecrows.
Evelyn Waugh
#54. I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.
Evelyn Waugh
#55. Brenda descended the great staircase step by step through alternations of dusk and rainbow.
Evelyn Waugh
#56. Suffering is none the less acute and much more lasting when it is put into words.
Evelyn Waugh
#57. Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.
Evelyn Waugh
#58. We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school.
Evelyn Waugh
#59. Downstairs Peter Beste-Chetwynde mixed himself another brandy and soda and turned a page in Havelock Ellis, which, next to The Wind in the Willows, was his favourite book.
Evelyn Waugh
#60. Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.
Evelyn Waugh
#61. Creative Endeavour lost her wings, Mrs Ape.
Evelyn Waugh
#62. Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.
Evelyn Waugh
#63. You seem to find everything banal." "it's a new word whose correct use i have only lately learnt,' said josephine with dignity. 'i find it applies to nearly everything.
Evelyn Waugh
#64. Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.
Evelyn Waugh
#65. I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.
Evelyn Waugh
#66. A work of art is not a matter of thinking beautiful thoughts or experiencing tender emotions , but of intelligence, skill, taste, proportion, knowledge, discipline and industry; especially discipline.
Evelyn Waugh
#67. This war has begun in darkness and it will end in silence.
Evelyn Waugh
#68. There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.
Evelyn Waugh
#69. Beer commercials are so patriotic: Made the American Way. What does that have to do with America? Is that what America stands for? Feeling sluggish and urinating frequently?
Evelyn Waugh
#70. My father from long habit took a book with him to the table and then, remembering my presence, furtively dropped it under his chair.
Evelyn Waugh
#71. One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page.
Evelyn Waugh
#72. But in the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.
Evelyn Waugh
#73. Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.
Evelyn Waugh
#75. As my intimacy with his family grew, I became part of the world which he sought to escape; I became one of the bonds which held him.
Evelyn Waugh
#76. Rex has never been unkind to me intentionally. It's just that he isn't a real person at all; he's just a few faculties of a man highly developed; the rest simply isn't there.
Evelyn Waugh
#77. You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.
Evelyn Waugh
#78. It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.
Evelyn Waugh
#79. At night his most frequent recurring dream was of doing The Times crossword puzzle; his most disagreeable that he was reading a tedious book aloud to his family.
Evelyn Waugh
#80. Instruction would be wasted on me. Just to give me the form and I'll sign on the dotted line.
Evelyn Waugh
#81. Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.
Evelyn Waugh
#82. The tour bus was supposed to be here ten minutes ago. Would it be possible to give them a ring to check they've not forgotten us?
Evelyn Waugh
#83. I [had] added another small piece to the pages of the atlas that were real to me.
Evelyn Waugh
#84. I never can understand how two men can write a book together; to me that's like three people getting together to have a baby.
Evelyn Waugh
#85. Oh, my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world? It's supposed to have quite the opposite effect. I feel as though all mankind, and God, too, were in a conspiracy against us.
Evelyn Waugh
#86. Cordelia: I hope I've got a vocation.
Charles: I don't know what that means.
Cordelia: It means you can be a nun. If you haven't a vocation it's no good however much you want to be; and if you have a vocation, you can't get away from it, however much you hate it.
Evelyn Waugh
#87. He did not fail in love, but he lost the joy of it [...]
Evelyn Waugh
#88. He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.
Evelyn Waugh
#89. The only thing that it is advisable to know in any language is the numerals; and even there, you can do a lot with the fingers.
Evelyn Waugh
#90. I said to the doctor, who was with us daily. 'He's got a wonderful will to live, hasn't he?'
'Would you put it like that? I should say a great fear of death.'
'Is there a difference?'
'Oh dear, yes. He doesn't derive any strength from his fear, you know. It's wearing him out.
Evelyn Waugh
#91. To Father Rothschild no passage was worse than any other. He thought of the sufferings of the saints, the mutability of human nature, the Four Last Things, and between whiles repeated snatches of the penitential psalms.
Evelyn Waugh
#92. Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.
Evelyn Waugh
#93. We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, and School. Frankly," said Mr Levy, "School is pretty bad ...
Evelyn Waugh
#94. News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.
Evelyn Waugh
#95. They are a very decent generous lot of people out here and they don't expect you to listen ... It's the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.
Evelyn Waugh
#96. When the waterholes were dry, people sought to drink at the mirage.
Evelyn Waugh
#97. One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
Evelyn Waugh
#98. Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.
Evelyn Waugh
#99. One does not travel, any more than one falls in love, to collect material. It is simply part of one's life ...
Evelyn Waugh
#100. It's a great thing in life to have a place you can't be moved from - too few of them
Evelyn Waugh
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