I’m one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.
EVELYN WAUGHMy children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.
More Evelyn Waugh Quotes
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One forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
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 -
All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.
EVELYN WAUGH -
After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can’t trust a person.
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 -
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 -
I’m quite deaf now; such a comfort.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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.
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 -
I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.
EVELYN WAUGH -
My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.
EVELYN WAUGH -
The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.
EVELYN WAUGH -
For in that city -New York; there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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.
EVELYN WAUGH -
He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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.
EVELYN WAUGH -
I think there’s almost nothing I can’t excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Once you start changing a name, you see, there’s no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.
EVELYN WAUGH