Quotes About Evelyn Waugh

He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.

Evelyn Waugh was in error when he said that in New York there was a neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistook for energy. There was, rather, a tensile excitement in that air which made one think — made me think for many years — that time spent asleep in New York was somehow time wasted. Whether this thought has lengthened or shortened my life I shall never know, but it has certainly colored it.

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

A cadaveric spasm had caused Rothwell to grab and hold onto a handful of dust at the moment of death, and Banks thought of the T.S. Eliot quotation, "I will show you fear in a handful of dust," which he had come across as the title of an Evelyn Waugh novel.

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

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