Quotes from Evelyn Waugh

The great charm in argument is really finding one's own opinions, not other people's.

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.

Beerbohm was a genius of the purest kind. He stands at the summit of his art.

In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice.

The sky over London was glorious, ochre and madder, as though a dozen tropic suns were simultaneously setting round the horizon . . . Everywhere the shells sparkled like Christmas baubles.

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness!

All fates are 'worse than death'.

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

Here I am,' I thought, 'back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity.

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

To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.

I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.

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.

Yes, cider and tinned salmon are the staple diet of the agricultural classes.

Of the many smells of Athens two seem to me the most characteristic - that of garlic, bold and deadly like acetylene gas. and that of dust, soft and warm and caressing like tweed.

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

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