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
wine order afterlife
Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has natural happiness without the beatific vision; no harps; no communal order; but wine and conversation and imperfect, various humanity. Limbo for the unbaptized, for the pious heathen, the sincere sceptic.
writing dust order
Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.
clothes enjoys fantasies man
What a man enjoys about a woman's clothes are his fantasies of how she would look without them
children expense pleasure posture
Of children as of procreation-the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable.
aesthetic almost came conclusion crime desire due expression repressed
I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression
war half world
At first it was impressive, but after half and hour deadly monotonous. It was like everything German - overdone.
fall drifting-off light
Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and the plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them. But when dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsud drifting off the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second and then - phut! vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing.
lips suspense hunger
The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness!
artist strive aesthetic
Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.
hats rabbits bunnies
Winston Churchill is always expecting rabbits to come out of an empty hat.
dog england englishmen
You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.
mean talking europe
Civilization - and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe - has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance ... It is no longer possible, as it was in the time of Gibbon, to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis on which it rests ... Christianity ... is in greater need of combative strength than it has been for centuries.
grows has-beens
Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.
thinking bed wells
Soon someone would say the fatal words, "Well, I think it’s time for me to go to bed.