Evelyn Waugh Quotes

181 Sourced Quotes

I've always had two principles throughout all my life in motion-pictures: never do before the camera what you would not do at home and never do at home what you would not do before the camera.

Evelyn Waugh
'I often think,' he continued, 'that we can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales!'

Evelyn Waugh
Her eyes greenish and remote, with a rich glint of lunacy.... "What did your Loved One pass on from?" she asked.

Evelyn Waugh
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
Of the many smells of Athens two seem to me the most characteristic - that of garlic, bold and deadly like acetylene gas. and that of dust, soft and warm and caressing like tweed.

Evelyn Waugh
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
Free as air; that's what they say- "free as air". Now they bring me my air in an iron barrel.

Evelyn Waugh
It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century.

Evelyn Waugh
But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiousity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

Evelyn Waugh
'... Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and the plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them. But when dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsud drifting off the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second and then - phut! vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing.'

Evelyn Waugh
He lay back for a little in his bed thinking about the smells of food... of the intoxicating breath of bakeries and dullness of buns.... He planned dinners, of enchanting aromatic foods... endless dinners, in which one could alternate flavour with flavour from sunset to dawn without satiety, while one breathed great draughts of the bouquet of old brandy.

Evelyn Waugh
There is a great deal to be said for the Arts. For one thing they offer the only career in which commercial failure is not necessarily discreditable.

Evelyn Waugh
'But what am I to teach them?' said Paul in sudden panic.
'Oh, I shouldn't try to teach them anything, not just yet, anyway. Just keep them quiet.'

Evelyn Waugh
Augustus Fagan, Esquire, Ph. D., Llanabba Castle, N. Wales, requires immediately junior assistant to teach Classics and English to University Standard with subsidiary Mathematics, German and French. Experience essential; first-class games essential...

Evelyn Waugh
I [had] added another small piece to the pages of the atlas that were real to me.

Evelyn Waugh
I'm one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.

Evelyn Waugh
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
The Conservative Party have never put the clock back a single second.

Evelyn Waugh
Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love, it kills art.

Evelyn Waugh
The splendid thing about education is that everyone wants it. Like influenza, you can give it away without losing any of it yourself.

Evelyn Waugh
She seemed to say "Look at me. I have done my share. I am beautiful. It is something quite out of the ordinary, this beauty of mine. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is my reward?"
That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, this magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty."

Evelyn Waugh
Assistant masters came and went…Some liked little boys too little and some too much.

Evelyn Waugh
March 15th
Imperial Banquet for Welcoming the English Cruelty to Animals

MENU OF FOODS

VITAMIN A
Tin Sardines

VITAMIN B
Roasted Beef

VITAMIN C
Small Roasted Suckling Porks

VITAMIN D
Hot Sheep and Onions

VITAMIN E
Spiced Turkey

VITAMIN F
Sweet Puddings

VITAMIN G
Coffee

VITAMIN H
Jam

Evelyn Waugh
Please bear in mind throughout that IT IS MEANT TO BE FUNNY.

Evelyn Waugh
"What war?" said the Prime Minister sharply. "No one has said anything to me about a war. I really think I should have been told. I'll be damned," he said defiantly, "if they shall have a war without consulting me. What's a cabinet for, if there's not more mutual confidence than that? What do they want a war for, anyway?"

Evelyn Waugh
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
"It is typical of Oxford," I said, "to start the new year in autumn."

Evelyn Waugh
She had heard someone say something about an Independent Labour Party, and was furious that she had not been asked.

Evelyn Waugh
'I couldn't understand why God had made the world at all...' I asked my bishop; he didn't know. He said that he didn't think the point arose as far as my practical duties as a parish priest were concerned..'

Evelyn Waugh
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