Evelyn Waugh Quotes

181 Sourced Quotes

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.

Evelyn Waugh
Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.

Evelyn Waugh
You should ask me whether I have any message for the British public. I have. It is this: Might must find a way. Not 'Force', remember; other nations use 'force'; we Britons alone use 'Might'.

Evelyn Waugh
One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

Evelyn Waugh
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
A copy of Dante's Purgatorio excited his especial disgust. "French, eh?" he said. "I guessed as much, and pretty dirty too, I shouldn't wonder. Now just you wait while I look up these here books"—how he said it!—"in my list. Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside."

Evelyn Waugh
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them — a diminishing number in my case.

Evelyn Waugh
It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.

Evelyn Waugh
Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.

Evelyn Waugh
Cliché hunting is a cruel and mischievous hobby—the badger digging of the literary blood sports.

Evelyn Waugh
Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables.

Evelyn Waugh
Any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul-destroying.

Evelyn Waugh
It is by crawling on the face of it that one learns a country.

Evelyn Waugh
And the only interest about him arises from the unusual series of events of which his shadow was witness.

Evelyn Waugh
To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.

Evelyn Waugh
That impersonal insensitive friendliness which takes the place of ceremony in that land of waifs and strays.

Evelyn Waugh
Any who have heard that sound will shrink at the recollection of it; it is the sound of English county families baying for broken glass.

Evelyn Waugh
What is this impulse of two people to build their beastly home? It's you & me, unborn, asserting our presence. All we are is a manifestation of the impulse to family life, and if by chance we have escaped the itch ourselves, Nature forces it upon us another way.

Evelyn Waugh
His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz — everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime.

Evelyn Waugh
After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.

Evelyn Waugh
"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
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
My father and I were never intimate in the sense of my coming to him with confidences or seeking advice. Our relationship was rather that of host and guest. Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

Evelyn Waugh
His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death.

Evelyn Waugh
He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.

Evelyn Waugh
I am not the least worried about the charge of using clichés. I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.

Evelyn Waugh
Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.

Evelyn Waugh
"Was anyone hurt?"
"No one I am thankful to say," said Mrs. Beaver, "except two housemaids who lost their heads and jumped through a glass roof into the paved court."

Evelyn Waugh
He had aroused three irreconcilable feuds in Capri; he had practiced black art in Cefalu; he had been cured of drug taking in California and of an Oedipus complex in Vienna.

Evelyn Waugh
Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in 'Old Maid'; the player who is finally left with it has lost.

Evelyn Waugh