Evelyn Waugh quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Evelyn Waugh on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

The cream and hot butter mingled and overflowed separating each glucose bead of caviar from its fellows, capping it in white and gold.

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

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.

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

We possess nothing certainly except the past

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

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.

It would be a dull world if we all thought alike.

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

This war has begun in darkness and it will end in silence.

Yes, I was determined to have a happy Christmas' 'Did you?' 'I think so. I don't remember it much, and that's always a good sign, isn't it?

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

Oh, I shouldn't try to teach them anything, not just yet, anyway. Just keep them quiet.

So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian.

The Second World War wasn't bad provided you were with nice people.

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

He did not fail in love, but he lost the joy of it [...]

The fortnight at Venice passed quickly and sweetly
perhaps too sweetly; I was drowning in honey, stingless.

No one is ever holy without suffering.

O God, make me good, but not yet.

...that kernel of gaiety that never breaks.

We are American at puberty. We die French.

Do you want to change?"
"It's the only evidence of life.

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

An artist must be a reactionary

Brenda descended the great staircase step by step through alternations of dusk and rainbow.

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

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

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

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

He was entrancing, with that epicene beauty which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.

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

six black Cordelias

[f]ortune is the lease capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long.

I suppose it's something to do with her black-brained religion not to take care of the body.

Beware the Anglo-Catholics. They're all sodomites with unpleasant accents." --Cousin Jasper

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.

Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of utterance.

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

Ah well, to the journalist every country is rich.

Instruction would be wasted on me. Just to give me the form and I'll sign on the dotted line.

We can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales.

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

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

My father greeted me with his usual air of mild regret.

Here my last love had died.

That's the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.

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

If only people realized Corbusier is pure nineteenth century, Manchester school utilitarian, and that's why they like him.

I know I am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the Faith.

Faster ... Faster ... it'll stop all right when the time comes ...

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

I'm quite deaf now; such a comfort.

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

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

Up to a point, Lord Copper.

I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.

Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.

Wine is a bride who brings a great dowry to the man who woos her persistently and gracefully.

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

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.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

Yes, cider and tinned salmon are the staple diet of the agricultural classes.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

As my intimacy with his family grew, I became part of the world which he sought to escape; I became one of the bonds which held him.

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

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

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

[ ... ] a sigh fit for the pillow, the sinking firelight, and a bedroom window open to the stars and the whisper of bare trees.

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

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.

There is nothing to be gained by multiplying social distinctions indefinitely.

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

There is something incomparably thrilling in first opening a brand new book.

I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.

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

The languor of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost!

There are two distinct kinds of meanness - those which come of loving money and of disliking it. Mine was the latter sort.

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

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

It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.

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

What is adolescence without trash?

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

Once you start changing a name, you see, there's no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.

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

You can't ever tell what's going to hurt people.

[Change is] the only evidence of life.

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

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.

There was one thing unforgivable, like things in the schoolroom so bad that only Mommy could deal with, to set up a rival good to God's.

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