Evelyn Waugh Quotes

181 Sourced Quotes

Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evelyn Waugh
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
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
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
I am suing Lord Beaverbrook for libel and hope for some lovely tax-free money in damages. He has very conveniently told some lies about me.

Evelyn Waugh
Wine is a bride who brings a great dowry to the man who woos her persistently and gracefully.

Evelyn Waugh
The great charm in argument is really finding one's own opinions, not other people's.

Evelyn Waugh
Beavers bred in captivity, inhabiting a concrete pool, will, if given the timber, fatuously go through all the motions of damming an ancestral stream.

Evelyn Waugh
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
Suffering is none the less acute and much more lasting when it is put into words.

Evelyn Waugh
The better sort of Ishmaelites have been Christian for many centuries and will not publicly eat human flesh uncooked in Lent, without special and costly dispensation from their bishop.

Evelyn Waugh
Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has natural happiness without the beatific vision; no harps; no communal order; but wine and conversation and imperfect, various humanity. Limbo for the unbaptized, for the pious heathen, the sincere sceptic.

Evelyn Waugh
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