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.
EVELYN WAUGHIt 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.
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.
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My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.
EVELYN WAUGH -
A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.
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 -
The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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 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 -
Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.
EVELYN WAUGH -
If a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well.
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 -
The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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.
EVELYN WAUGH -
I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.
EVELYN WAUGH -
O God, make me good, but not yet.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.
EVELYN WAUGH -
One forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
EVELYN WAUGH -
To understand all is to forgive all.
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 -
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.
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 -
News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.
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He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?
EVELYN WAUGH