But in the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it’s lyric verse.

There is an Easter sense in which all things are made new in the risen Christ. A tiny gleam of this is reflected in all true art.

You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.

Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.

If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough there to fill a full lifetime with delight. Venice, with all its complexity and variety, is in itself the greatest surviving work of art in the world.

I'm quite deaf now; such a comfort.

Evelyn Waugh: How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William? Sir William Beveridge: I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it. Waugh: I get mine spreading alarm and despondency and I get more satisfaction than you do.