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.
EVELYN WAUGHAfter all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can’t trust a person.
More Evelyn Waugh Quotes
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Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?
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.
EVELYN WAUGH -
To understand all is to forgive all.
EVELYN WAUGH -
I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.
EVELYN WAUGH -
All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Enclosing every thin man, there’s a fat man demanding elbow-room.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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.
EVELYN WAUGH -
The splendid thing about education is that everyone wants it. Like influenza, you can give it away without losing any of it yourself.
EVELYN WAUGH -
If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.
EVELYN WAUGH -
I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.
EVELYN WAUGH -
It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one’s stature on the edge of the door.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.
EVELYN WAUGH -
The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.
EVELYN WAUGH -
An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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.
EVELYN WAUGH -
I’m one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.
EVELYN WAUGH -
If a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well.
EVELYN WAUGH -
A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.
EVELYN WAUGH -
It is a curious thing. That every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
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.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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.
EVELYN WAUGH -
He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.
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.
EVELYN WAUGH -
If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.
EVELYN WAUGH