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

Don't give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can't express them. Don't analyze yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.

— Evelyn Waugh

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

— Evelyn Waugh

If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.

— Evelyn Waugh

His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death.

— Evelyn Waugh

Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

— Evelyn Waugh

Other nations use force; we Britons alone use Might.

— Evelyn Waugh

We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for our ability to amuse them.

— Evelyn Waugh

The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.

— Evelyn Waugh

If, for instance, they have heard something from the postman, they attribute it to a semi-official statement; if they have fallen into conversation with a stranger at a bar, they can conscientiously describe him as a source that has hitherto proved unimpeachable. It is only when the journalist is reporting a whim of his own, and one to which he attaches minor importance, that he defines it as the opinion of well-informed circles.

— Evelyn Waugh

Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.

— Evelyn Waugh

News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.

— 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

Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying.

— Evelyn Waugh

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

— Evelyn Waugh

In the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.

— Evelyn Waugh

Saints are simply men and women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God.

— Evelyn Waugh

That's the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.

— Evelyn Waugh

If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.

— Evelyn Waugh

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.

— Evelyn Waugh

One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

Most people . . . fix the prime of a man's life somewhere about thirty or thirty-five. Personally . . . I should place it at between fifteen and sixteen. It is then, it always seems to me, that his vitality is at its highest; he has greatest sense of the ludicrous and least sense of dignity. After that time, decay begins to set in. Possibly he attains to the "ungainly wisdom" of the Sixth Form and in that languorous atmosphere drinks deep of the opiate of specialization; possibly he attains to some abnormal form of muscular development and in his gyrations upon the football field loses his sense of the ludicrous; possibly he attains to an official position in the school and loses that still greater gift, his sense of humor.

— Evelyn Waugh