Evelyn Waugh Quotes

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

One can write, think and pray exclusively of others; dreams are all egocentric.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. ... Or it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won't quite despair of me in the end.

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

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

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

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

O God, make me good, but not yet.

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.

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

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.

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

I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.

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.

We possess nothing certainly except the past

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.

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