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.
human love root wisdom
To know and love another human being is the root of all wisdom
becoming expect gentlemen gets indecent sent
I expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.
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
children expense pleasure posture
Of children as of procreation-the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable.
clothes enjoys fantasies man
What a man enjoys about a woman's clothes are his fantasies of how she would look without them
english-author except fit youth
What is youth except a man or woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?
chap english-author until wants
News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.
happier scientist scientists
If politicians and scientist were lazier, how much happier we should all be.
dying english-author lyric national quotation
In the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.
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!