Evelyn Waugh quotes:

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

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

Old boy," said Grimes, "you're in love.""Nonsense!""Smitten?" said Grimes."No, no.""The tender passion?""No.""Cupid's jolly little darts?""No.""Spring fancies, love's young dream?""Nonsense!""Not even a quickening of the pulse?""No.""A sweet despair?""Certainly not.""A trembling hope?""No.""A frisson? a Je ne sais quoi?""Nothing of the sort.""Liar!" said Grimes."

Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.

News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read.

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

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

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.

News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.

We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.

If she looked further than the wedding, it was to see marriage as the beginning of individual existence, this skirmish from which one one's spurs, from which one set out on the true quests of life.

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.

His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz--everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom. . . ."

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.

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.

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.

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.

What is youth except a man or woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?

Peter Pastmaster and the absurdly youthful colonel of the new force were drawing up a list of suitable officers in Bratts Club. 'Most of war seems to consist of hanging about,' he said. 'Let's at least hang about with our own friends.

But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn't know existed.

...the collection of sombre and bulky objects that had stood in his father's dressing room; indestructable presents for his wedding and twenty-first birthday, ivory, brass bound, covered in pigskin, crested and gold mounted, suggestive of expensive Edwardian masculinity--racing flasks and hunting flasks, cigar cases, tobacco jars, jockeys, elaborate meerschaum pipes, button hooks and hat brushes."

The avalanche was down, the hillside swept bare behind it; the last echoes died on the white slopes; the new mount glittered and lay still in the silent valley."

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.

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

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

My father and I were never intimate in the sense of my coming to him with confidences or seeking advice. Our relationship was rather that of host and guest. Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.

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

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.

The tourist debauches the great monuments of antiquity, a comic figure, always inapt in his comments, incongruous in his appearance; ...avarice and deceit attack him at every step; the shops that he patronizes are full of forgeries... But we need feel no scruple or twinge of uncertainty; 'we' are travelers and cosmopolitans; the tourist is the other fellow.

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.

O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin,

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

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 worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him. Julia to Charles

Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn't know existed.

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

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.

...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.

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

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.

MGM bores me when I see them, but I don't see them much. They have been a help in getting me introductions to morticians, who are the only people worth knowing.

The Welsh are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing. Sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver.

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

She had heard someone say something about an Independent Labour Party, and was furious that she had not been asked.

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

Beavers bred in captivity, inhabiting a concrete pool, will, if given the timber, fatuously go through all the motions of damming an ancestral stream.

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

Of children as of procreation -- the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable

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

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.

The Roman Catholic Church has the unique power of keeping remote control over human souls which have once been part of her. G.K. Chesterton has compared this to the fisherman's line, which allows the fish the illusion of free play in the water and yet has him by the hook; in his own time the fisherman by a 'twitch upon the thread' draws the fish to land.

...the collection of sombre and bulky objects that had stood in his father's dressing room; indestructable presents for his wedding and twenty-first birthday, ivory, brass bound, covered in pigskin, crested and gold mounted, suggestive of expensive Edwardian masculinity--racing flasks and hunting flasks, cigar cases, tobacco jars, jockeys, elaborate meerschaum pipes, button hooks and hat brushes.

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

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

I loved buildings that had grown silently with the centuries, catching the best of each generation while time curbed the artist's pride and the philistine's vulgarity and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman.

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.

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

No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to Hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretends it's God and hate that.

Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.

It (modernization) is just another jungle closing in.

The audiences certainly have [declined]. If I go to the theatre now I find people come there to eat and smoke and talk to one another. And look like scarecrows.

Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has natural happiness without the beatific vision; no harps; no communal order; but wine and conversation and imperfect, various humanity. Limbo for the unbaptized, for the pious heathen, the sincere sceptic.

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.

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.

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

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

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

There is no ordinary run of mankind, there are only individuals who are totally different. And whether a man is naked and black and stands on one foot in Sudan or is clothed in some kind of costume in a bus in England, they are still individuals of entirely different characters.

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.

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

I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.

Enclosing every thin man, there's a fat man demanding elbow-room.

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

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

... the understatement, the self-ridicule, the delight in the foreignness of foreigners, the complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited.

My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

You don't remove the evil in a person by killing the person.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

O God, make me good, but not yet.

What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen.

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