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 WAUGHRemember 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.
More Evelyn Waugh Quotes
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He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.
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The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.
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 -
I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
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 -
Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.
EVELYN WAUGH -
All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.
EVELYN WAUGH -
He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.
EVELYN WAUGH -
My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.
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 can’t bare you when you’re not amusing.
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 -
If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.
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