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 WAUGHAll this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.
More Evelyn Waugh Quotes
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I put the words down and push them a bit.
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 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 -
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 -
Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.
EVELYN WAUGH -
What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen.
EVELYN WAUGH -
To understand all is to forgive all.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.
EVELYN WAUGH -
We possess nothing certainly except the past.
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 -
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 -
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 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 -
The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.
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 -
It is a curious thing. That every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
EVELYN WAUGH -
There is something incomparably thrilling in first opening a brand new book.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
EVELYN WAUGH -
For in that city -New York; there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.
EVELYN WAUGH -
When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.
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 -
Enclosing every thin man, there’s a fat man demanding elbow-room.
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 -
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