Evelyn Waugh Quotes

O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.

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

To understand all is to forgive all.

I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

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

One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page.

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.

When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.

The worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him. Julia to Charles

I am suing Lord Beaverbrook for libel and hope for some lovely tax-free money in damages. He has very conveniently told some lies about me.

We possess nothing certainly except the past

I don't believe that people would ever fall in love or want to be married if they hadn't been told about it. It's like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn't been told it existed.

Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

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.

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?

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.

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.

No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to Hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretends it's God and hate that.

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.

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

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.

'I don't believe you've changed at all, Charles.' 'No, I'm afraid not.' 'D'you want to change?' 'It's the only evidence of life.'

I can't bare you when you're not amusing.

His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word.

Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.

Now we shall both be alone, and I shall have no way of making you understand.' 'I don't want to make it easier for you,' I said; 'I hope your heart may break; but I do understand.

We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.

You don't remove the evil in a person by killing the person.

I never can understand how two men can write a book together; to me that's like three people getting together to have a baby.

'I will not stand for being called a woman in my own house' she said.

I am annoyed to find myself continually described by people whom I have never set eyes on as bad-tempered.

Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.

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

Have you at any time been detained in a mental home or similar institution? If so, give particulars.' 'I was at Scone College, Oxford, for two years,' said Paul.

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.

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.

If one's object is ascetic, it is far better to stay in London or Paris or New York; there is practically no extreme of heat or cold, physical risk, loneliness, hunger or thirst that cannot, with a little ingenuity, be conveniently achieved in the centres of civilization.

Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.

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.

Most writers in the course of their careers become thick-skinned and learn to accept vituperation, which in any other profession would be unimaginably offensive, as a healthy counterpoise to unintelligent praise.

Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.

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

The better sort of Ishmaelites have been Christian for many centuries and will not publicly eat human flesh uncooked in Lent, without special and costly dispensation from their bishop.

We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school.

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.

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.