Evelyn Waugh Quotes

Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.

I'm quite deaf now; such a comfort.

Here I am,' I thought, 'back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity.

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.

You don't remove the evil in a person by killing the person.

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

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.

Quomondo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

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

You spend the first term at Oxford meeting interesting and exciting people and the rest of your time there avoiding them

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.

Soon someone would say the fatal words, "Well, I think it’s time for me to go to bed.

I have no technical psychological interest; it is drama, speech,and events that interest me.

I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.

Enclosing every thin man, there's a fat man demanding elbow-room.

I think it's one of the kindest things you can do to the very wicked, to give them time to repent.

It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one's stature on the edge of the door.

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.

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.

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

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.

The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness!

All fates are ‘worse than death’.

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.

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.

One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page.

At first it was impressive, but after half and hour deadly monotonous. It was like everything German - overdone.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

I never can understand how two men can write a book together; to me that's like three people getting together to have a baby.

I am annoyed to find myself continually described by people whom I have never set eyes on as bad-tempered.

I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.

'I will not stand for being called a woman in my own house' she said.

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.

His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word.

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

MGM bores me when I see them, but I don't see them much. They have been a help in getting me introductions to morticians, who are the only people worth knowing.

I do not believe the expenditure of $2.50 for a book entitles the purchaser to the personal friendship of the author.

Now we shall both be alone, and I shall have no way of making you understand.' 'I don't want to make it easier for you,' I said; 'I hope your heart may break; but I do understand.

I had been there before; I knew all about it.

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.

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

The tour bus was supposed to be here ten minutes ago. Would it be possible to give them a ring to check they've not forgotten us?

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.

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

Beerbohm was a genius of the purest kind. He stands at the summit of his art.

How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation.

But 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.

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.

I am sorry to disturb you, ' said James politely, 'but these people wished to shoot us.

Success in this world depends on knowing exactly how little effort each job is worth...distribution of energy...