Evelyn Waugh Quotes

181 Sourced Quotes

All day the heat had been barely supportable but at evening a breeze arose in the West, blowing from the heart of the setting sun and from the ocean, which lay unseen, unheard behind the scrubby foothills. It shook the rusty fringes of palm-leaf and swelled the dry sounds of summer, the frog-voices, the grating cicadas, and the ever present pulse of music from the neighbouring native huts.

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
My father spent the last 20 years of his life writing letters. If someone thanked him for a present, he thanked them for thanking him and there was no end to the exchange but death.

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

Evelyn Waugh
It's a rather pleasant change when all your life you've had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me.

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
He had no wish to obliterate anything he had written, but he would dearly have liked to revise it, envying painters, who are allowed to return to the same theme time and time again, clarifying and enriching until they have done all they can with it. A novelist is condemned to provide a succession of novelties, new names for characters, new incidents for his plots, new scenery; but, Mr Pinfold maintained, most men harbour the germs of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters — Dickens and Balzac even — were flagrantly guilty.

Evelyn Waugh
O god thou has appointed three score years and ten as man's allotted span but O god statistics go to prove that comparatively few ever attain that age.

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

Evelyn Waugh
When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning.

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
Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.

Evelyn Waugh
Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen, paper, and no telephone or wife.

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

Evelyn Waugh
They had loitered together of old on many a doorstep and forced an entry into many a stricken home.

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
I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

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
"We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University, being in this the twenty-fourth year of our life, summoned by the wisdom of Almighty God and the unanimous voice of our people to the throne of our ancestors, do hereby proclaim..." Seth paused in his dictation and gazed out across the harbour where in the fresh breeze of early morning the last dhow was setting sail for the open sea. "Rats," he said; "stinking curs. They are all running away."

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

Evelyn Waugh
There is practically no sense that is not violated every time we return from the country or the sea to Paris or London or New York.

Evelyn Waugh
An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of his age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition.

Evelyn Waugh