I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.
EVELYN WAUGHAesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.
More Evelyn Waugh Quotes
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I think there’s almost nothing I can’t excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.
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 -
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.
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 -
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 -
I’m quite deaf now; such a comfort.
EVELYN WAUGH -
To understand all is to forgive all.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.
EVELYN WAUGH -
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them…
EVELYN WAUGH -
Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
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 -
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 -
O God, make me good, but not yet.
EVELYN WAUGH