Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waughwas 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 Falland A Handful of Dust, the novel Brideshead Revisitedand the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour. Waugh is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth28 October 1903
common-experience common miserable
I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.
beautiful truth growing-up
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.
wine age comfort
Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher
brideshead-revisited
O God, make me good, but not yet.
wall heart garden
But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.
father writing thanking-him
Beware of writing to me. I always answer ... My father spent the last 20 years of his life writing letters. If someone thanked him for a wedding present, he thanked them for thanking him and there was no end to the exchange but death.
self denial hardship
... the understatement, the self-ridicule, the delight in the foreignness of foreigners, the complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited.
heaven mind atheism
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.
trying world satisfaction
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.
intense pleasure leather
Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.
ideas catholic would-be
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.
artist age standing-out
An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.
likes tourists traveller
Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.
money player cards
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.