Best 244 quotes of Evelyn Waugh on MyQuotes

Evelyn Waugh

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    Evelyn Waugh

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

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    Evelyn Waugh

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

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    Evelyn Waugh

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

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    Evelyn Waugh

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

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    Evelyn Waugh

    An artist must be a reactionary

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    Evelyn Waugh

    An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor [group think] of the age and not go flopping along. By doing this he helps us to question and reassess our past, present and future situations, our assumptions and our options.

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    Evelyn Waugh

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

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    Evelyn Waugh

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

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    Evelyn Waugh

    Anyone 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 who find prison so soul-destroying.

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    Evelyn Waugh

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

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    Evelyn Waugh

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

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    Evelyn Waugh

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

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    Evelyn Waugh

    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?

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    Evelyn Waugh

    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.

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    Evelyn Waugh

    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.

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    Evelyn Waugh

    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.

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    Evelyn Waugh

    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.

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    Evelyn Waugh

    Civilization - and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe - has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance ... It is no longer possible, as it was in the time of Gibbon, to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis on which it rests ... Christianity ... is in greater need of combative strength than it has been for centuries.

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    Evelyn Waugh

    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.

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    Evelyn Waugh

    Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and the plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them. But when dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsud drifting off the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second and then - phut! vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing.

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    Evelyn Waugh

    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.

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    Evelyn Waugh

    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.

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    Evelyn Waugh

    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.

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    Evelyn Waugh

    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.

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    Evelyn Waugh

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

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    Evelyn Waugh

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

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    Evelyn Waugh

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

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    Evelyn Waugh

    From the earliest times the Welsh have been looked upon as an unclean people. It is thus that they have preserved their racial integrity. Their sons and daughters rarely mate with humankind except their own blood relations.

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    Evelyn Waugh

    Have you at any time been detained in a mental home or similar institution? If so, give particulars.' 'I was at Scone College, Oxford, for two years,' said Paul.

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    Evelyn Waugh

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

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    Evelyn Waugh

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

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    Evelyn Waugh

    He lay back for a little in his bed thinking about the smells of food . . . of the intoxicating breath of bakeries and dullness of buns. . . . He planned dinners, of enchanting aromatic foods . . . endless dinners, in which one could alternate flavour with flavour from sunset to dawn without satiety, while one breathed great draughts of the bouquet of old brandy.

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    Evelyn Waugh

    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.

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    Evelyn Waugh

    Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.

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    Evelyn Waugh

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

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    Evelyn Waugh

    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.

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    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.

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    Evelyn Waugh

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

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    Evelyn Waugh

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

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    Evelyn Waugh

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

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    Evelyn Waugh

    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.

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    Evelyn Waugh

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

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    Evelyn Waugh

    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.

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    Evelyn Waugh

    I don't believe you've changed at all, Charles.' 'No, I'm afraid not.' 'D'you want to change?' 'It's the only evidence of life.

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    Evelyn Waugh

    If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.

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    Evelyn Waugh

    I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.

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    Evelyn Waugh

    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.

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    Evelyn Waugh

    If, for instance, they have heard something from the postman, they attribute it to a semi-official statement; if they have fallen into conversation with a stranger at a bar, they can conscientiously describe him as a source that has hitherto proved unimpeachable. It is only when the journalist is reporting a whim of his own, and one to which he attaches minor importance, that he defines it as the opinion of well-informed circles.

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    Evelyn Waugh

    If it could only be like this always - always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper.

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    Evelyn Waugh

    If one's object is ascetic, it is far better to stay in London or Paris or New York; there is practically no extreme of heat or cold, physical risk, loneliness, hunger or thirst that cannot, with a little ingenuity, be conveniently achieved in the centres of civilization.