Quotes from Evelyn Waugh

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.

its a rather pleasant change when all your life you've had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me.

It would be a dull world if we all thought alike.

My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.

You spend the first term at Oxford meeting interesting and exciting people and the rest of your time there avoiding them

I took you out to dinner to warn you of charm. I warned you expressly and in great detail of the Flyte family. 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, Charles, it has killed you.' [Anthony Blanche to Charles Ryder]

You could appreciate the beauty of the world by trying to paint it.

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

Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.

Just the place to bury a crock of gold,' said Sebastian. 'I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

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.

It's awful to think that I shall probably never, as long as I live, see you dancing like that again all by yourself.

Here my last love had died.

Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.

I loved buildings that had grown silently with the centuries, catching the best of each generation while time curbed the artist's pride and the philistine's vulgarity and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman.

When the waterholes were dry, people sought to drink at the mirage.

Do you want to change? It's the only evidence of life.

She was daily surprised by the things he knew and the things he did not know; both, at the time, added to his attraction.

Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.

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

Miss Runcible wore trousers and Miles touched up his eye-lashes in the dining-room of the hotel where they stopped for luncheon. So they were asked to leave.

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

Frankly, said the Doctor, I am at a loss to understand my own emotions. I can think of no entertainment that fills me with greater detestation than a display of competitive athletics, none - except possibly folk dancing.

My father greeted me with his usual air of mild regret.