Evelyn Waugh Quotes

181 Sourced Quotes

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
He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.

Evelyn Waugh
I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.

Evelyn Waugh
Of children as of procreation— the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable.

Evelyn Waugh
Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.

Evelyn Waugh
There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit.

Evelyn Waugh
Why, only last term we sent a man who had never been in a laboratory in his life as a senior Science Master to one of our leading public schools. He came [to our agency] wanting to do private coaching in music. He's doing very well, I believe.

Evelyn Waugh
"I have been here before," I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.

Evelyn Waugh
Impotence and sodomy are socially O.K. but birth control is flagrantly middle-class.

Evelyn Waugh
My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.

Evelyn Waugh
O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.

Evelyn Waugh
Randolph Churchill went into hospital…to have a lung removed. It was announced that the trouble was not 'malignant'…it was a typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.

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
These memories, which are my life—for we possess nothing certainly except the past—were always with me.

Evelyn Waugh
I will not stand for being called a woman in my own house…

Evelyn Waugh