Evelyn Waugh Quotes

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

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

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.

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

The great charm in argument is really finding one's own opinions, not other people's.

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

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.

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?

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

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

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.

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

We possess nothing certainly except the past

O God, make me good, but not yet.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.