Evelyn Waugh Quotations

In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice.

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

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

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.

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

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

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

There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief.

Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.

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

You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.

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

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

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

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.

We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school.

Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.

My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.

Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.

The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.

Other nations use 'force' we Britons alone use 'Might'.

We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.

Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.

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.

When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.

Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.

Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

I haven't been to sleep for over a year. That's why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn't sleep.

What is youth except a man or woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?

I put the words down and push them a bit.

If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.

Of children as of procreation-the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable.

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

I expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.

To know and love another human being is the root of all wisdom

What a man enjoys about a woman's clothes are his fantasies of how she would look without them

If politicians and scientist were lazier, how much happier we should all be.

In the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.

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.

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; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.

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. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.

If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be

To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.

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

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

Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.

Beer commercials are so patriotic: Made the American Way. What does that have to do with America? Is that what America stands for? Feeling sluggish and urinating frequently?

I don't believe that people would ever fall in love or want to be married if they hadn't been told about it. It's like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn't been told it existed.

If a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well.

He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole.

Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.

A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.

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

She told me later that she had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a particular book, one will sometimes have one's attention caught by another, take it down, glance at the title page and saying "I must read that, too, when I've the time," replace it and continue the search.

The most futile and disastrous day seems well spent when it is reviewed through the blue, fragrant smoke of a Havana Cigar.

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

Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.'-William Boot

Don't give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can't express them. Don't analyze yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.

Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher

But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity 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.

O God, make me good, but not yet.

What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen.

Properly understood, style is not a seductive decoration added to a functional structure; it is of the essence of a work of art. The necessary elements of style are lucidity, elegance, and individuality; these three qualities combine to form a preservative which ensures the nearest approximation to permanence in the fugitive art of letters.

Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.

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

I think there's almost nothing I can't excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.

Evelyn Waugh: How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William? Sir William Beveridge: I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it. Waugh: I get mine spreading alarm and despondency and I get more satisfaction than you do.

... the understatement, the self-ridicule, the delight in the foreignness of foreigners, the complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited.

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

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

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.

Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?

The langour of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth - all save this come and go with us through life...These things are a part of life itself; but languor - the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse - that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.

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.

It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.

There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.

I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately of what was in season, drunk fine claret, slept in my own sheets; I shall live long.

There is an Easter sense in which all things are made new in the risen Christ. A tiny gleam of this is reflected in all true art.

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.

That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.

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

I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits.

Its theme-- the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters-- was perhaps presumptuously large, but I make no apology for it.

Of children as of procreation -- the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable

Dearest Charles-- I found a box of this paper at the back of a bureau so I must write to you as I am mourning for my lost innocence. It never looked like living. The doctors despaired of it from the start... I am never quite alone. Members of my family keep turning up and collecting luggage and going away again, but the white raspberries are ripe. I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits. Love or what you will. S.

The Roman Catholic Church has the unique power of keeping remote control over human souls which have once been part of her. G.K. Chesterton has compared this to the fisherman's line, which allows the fish the illusion of free play in the water and yet has him by the hook; in his own time the fisherman by a 'twitch upon the thread' draws the fish to land.

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

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.

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.

Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.

that is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back.

Saints are simply men and women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God.

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.

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

We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.

The sky over London was glorious, ochre and madder, as though a dozen tropic suns were simultaneously setting round the horizon . . . Everywhere the shells sparkled like Christmas baubles.

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.