Top Evelyn Waugh Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Evelyn Waugh Biography

Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (/ˈɑːrθər ˈiːvlɪn ˈsɪndʒən wɔː/; 28 October 1903 – 10 April 1966) was an English writer of novels, biographies and travel books. He was also a prolific journalist and reviewer of books. His most famous works include the early satires Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), the novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour (1952–61). Waugh is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century.

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Evelyn Waugh Quotes

All fates are ‘worse than death’.

Death, Fate, Fates, Worse

If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.

Book, Brideshead, Differences, Hard, Reading, Tell

Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.

Down, Dust, Order, Screen, Valuables, Writing

We are American at puberty. We die French.

American, Die, Dies, French, Puberty

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

Ideas, Poetic, Utterance, Utterances

Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and the plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them. But when dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsud drifting off the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second and then - phut! vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing.

Drifting Off, Fall, Light, Miss, Pipe, Plates

The tourist debauches the great monuments of antiquity, a comic figure, always inapt in his comments, incongruous in his appearance;. . . avarice and deceit attack him at every step; the shops that he patronizes are full of forgeries. . . But we need feel no scruple or twinge of uncertainty; 'we' are travelers and cosmopolitans; the tourist is the other fellow.

Attack, Comments, Deceit, Monuments, Steps, Tourists

What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen.

Except, Fit, Men, Woman, Youth

A work of art is not a matter of thinking beautiful thoughts or experiencing tender emotions , but of intelligence, skill, taste, proportion, knowledge, discipline and industry; especially discipline.

Art, Beautiful, Experiencing, Industry, Thinking

No one is ever holy without suffering.

Brideshead Revisited, Holy, Suffering

that is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back.

Apt, Dead, Last Words, Lasts, Ten, Years

News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read.

Care, Chap, News, Read, Want

Beer commercials are so patriotic: Made the American Way. What does that have to do with America? Is that what America stands for? Feeling sluggish and urinating frequently?

America, Beer, Commercials, Patriotic

I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.

Core, Grit, Layers, Lively, Ornaments, Pearls

That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.

Heart, Reward, Sadness, Spoke, Years

I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.

Book, Books, Novel, Novels, Travel, Worst

The languor of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost!

Irrecoverably, Lost, Quickly, Unique, Youth

MGM bores me when I see them, but I don't see them much. They have been a help in getting me introductions to morticians, who are the only people worth knowing.

Bores, Helping, Knowing, Morticians, People

Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.

Action, Actions, Alone, Determine, Worth

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.

Card, Cards, Left, Money, Player, Rid

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