Evelyn Waugh Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Evelyn Waugh's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Writer Evelyn Waugh's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 198 quotes on this page collected since October 28, 1903! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.

  • There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief.

    Decline and Fall (1928) pt. 2, ch. 4
  • To understand all is to forgive all.

    Evelyn Waugh (2012). “Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder”, p.34, Penguin UK
  • The tour bus was supposed to be here ten minutes ago. Would it be possible to give them a ring to check they've not forgotten us?

  • 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.

    Decline and Fall (1928) pt. 3, ch. 4
  • The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.

    Evelyn Waugh (1983). “The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh”, Methuen
  • Enclosing every thin man, there's a fat man demanding elbow-room.

    Evelyn Waugh (1994). “The Sword of Honour Trilogy”
  • 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.

    Quoted in Noel Annan, Our Age (1990)
  • Free as air; that's what they say- "free as air". Now they bring me my air in an iron barrel.

  • Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?

  • If a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well.

    EVELYN WAUGH (1958). “VILE BODIES & BLACK MISCHIEF”
  • After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.

    Evelyn Waugh (1958). “Vile Bodies”, p.95, Obelix Books
  • Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.

    Evelyn Waugh (1958). “The world of Evelyn Waugh”
  • "It is typical of Oxford," I said, "to start the new year in autumn."

    "Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder". Book by Evelyn Waugh, 1945.
  • He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole.

  • Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.

    Evelyn Waugh (2012). “A Little Learning: The First Volume of an Autobiography”, p.128, Penguin UK
  • 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 (2012). “A Little Order: Selected Journalism”, p.175, Penguin UK
  • 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 (1983). “The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh”, Methuen
  • I can't bare you when you're not amusing.

  • 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.

    "Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder". Book by Evelyn Waugh, 1945.
  • The Welsh are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing. Sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver.

    Evelyn Waugh (1958). “The world of Evelyn Waugh”
  • 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.

    Evelyn Waugh (1964). “Scoop: a novel”
  • 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.

  • The most futile and disastrous day seems well spent when it is reviewed through the blue, fragrant smoke of a Havana Cigar.

  • She had heard someone say something about an Independent Labour Party, and was furious that she had not been asked.

    Evelyn Waugh (1958). “Vile Bodies”, p.23, Obelix Books
  • 'I will not stand for being called a woman in my own house' she said.

    'Scoop' (1938) bk. 2, ch. 1
  • Once you start changing a name, you see, there's no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.

    Evelyn Waugh (2002). “The loved one: an Anglo-American tragedy”
  • ...she had regained what I thought she had lost forever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, "Surely I was made for some other purpose than this?

    Evelyn Waugh (1958). “The world of 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 (1983). “The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh”, Methuen
  • I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits.

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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 198 quotes from the Writer Evelyn Waugh, starting from October 28, 1903! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!