Evelyn Waugh Quotes - Page 4

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.

You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.

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

There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.

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

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.

All fates are ‘worse than death’.

...its a rather pleasant change when all your life you've had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me.

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

They are a very decent generous lot of people out here and they don't expect you to listen.... It's the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.

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

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

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

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

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

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.

She told me later that she had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a particular book, one will sometimes have one's attention caught by another, take it down, glance at the title page and saying "I must read that, too, when I've the time," replace it and continue the search.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Of the many smells of Athens two seem to me the most characteristic - that of garlic, bold and deadly like acetylene gas. and that of dust, soft and warm and caressing like tweed.