Evelyn Waugh Quotes (1903-1966)

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

“Sebastian entered — dove-grey flannel, white crepe-de-Chine shirt, a Charvet tie, my tie as it happened, a pattern of postage stamps.”

“Sherry is a name much misused, and even in the strictest sense applicable to a great diversity of wine, from Manzanilla, as pale and dry as old paper, to the heavy, sweet, brown wine sold under a variety of names often as ‘East India’ or Solera. ... I do not, myself, find that the richer and sweeter sherries serve any purpose that is not more perfectly fulfilled by port, but this is purely an individual judgement. Nothing could be more delicious than a glass of pale, very dry Fino, chilled, at noon, in the height of summer. It makes an admirable apéritif before and at the beginning of a dinner. Like all good wines, it is best enjoyed in tranquillity; the ‘sherry party’ of recent growth is an abomination to me. For as long, however, as people continue to entertain between six and eight in the evening they will find Amontillados and Amorosos a useful knock-about standby, less deleterious and less expensive than cocktails.”

“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.”

“’If you must know, it's my thunderbox.’.. He..dragged out the treasure, a brass-bound, oak cube... On the inside of the lid was a plaque bearing the embossed title Connolly's Chemical Closet.”

“They told me, Francis Hinsley, they told me you were hung With red protruding eye-balls and black protruding tongue. I wept as I remembered how often you and I Had laughed about Los Angeles and now ’tis here you’ll lie; Here pickled in formaldehyde and painted like a whore, Shrimp-pink incorruptible, not lost nor gone before.”

“Father Sheerin suggests that Catholic conservatism is the product of the defensive policy necessary in the last century against the nationalistic-masonic secularism of the time. I would ask him to consider that the function of the Church in every age has been conservative—to transmit undiminished and uncontaminated the creed inherited from its predecessors.”

“I believe in nationality; not in terms of race or of divine commissions for world conquest, but simply this: mankind inevitably organizes itself into communities according to its geographical distribution; these communities by sharing a common history develop common characteristics and inspire a local loyalty; the individual family develops most happily and fully when it accepts these local limits. I do not think that British prosperity must necessarily be inimical to anyone else, but if, on occasions, it is, I want Britain to prosper and not her rivals.”

“The peoples of other continents look to America half in hope and half in alarm. They see that their own future is inextricably involved with it, and their judgment is based on what they see in the cinema, what they read in the popular magazines, what they hear from the loudest advertiser. Gratitude for the enormous material benefits received is tempered with distaste for what they believe is the spiritual poverty of the benefactor. It is only when one travels in America that one realizes that most Americans either share this distaste or are genuinely unaware of the kind of false impression which interested parties have conspired to spread.”

“Behind all the bluster and cursing and fisticuffs he has an elementary sense of chivalry – respect for women, pity of the weak, love of honour – which keeps breaking in.”

“In a hundred years' time "the kind of man who reads P. G. Wodehouse for pleasure" may become synonymous with an extravagantly fastidious taste. And that is indeed as it should be. What can be more enviable than to enjoy the rewards of limitless contemporary popularity with the confidence, in the distant years, when copyrights have lapsed and royalties lost their importance, of a serene ascent into a rarer atmosphere, a little above the clouds, away from the crush where only the keen and the noble can follow?”

“He was pure Cockney, intolerant of everything foreign. English painting, so far as it has excelled at all, has done so in inverse relation to the influence of Italy and France. I do not know of any foreign painter except Svoboda who rivalled the English School in their own métier. Comparable Parisians of the nineteenth century tended towards the lubricious or the allegorical. There is one corner of the artistic field that will remain for ever England.”

“Mr E. M. Forster, particularly in the first half of Pharos and Pharillon, set a model of lucidity and individuality in which the elegance is so unobtrusive as to pass some readers unnoticed.”

“If I were a Spaniard I should be fighting for General Franco. As an Englishman I am not in the predicament of choosing between two evils. I am not a Fascist, nor shall I become one unless it were the only alternative to Marxism. It is mischievous to suggest that such a choice is imminent.”

“After his very early days, when he gambolled with an ornate and consciously absurd vocabulary, he wrote supremely well. His essay on Venice, originally an article in the Daily Mail, is a model not only of imaginative observation but of variety of structure. It is, I believe, the best travel sketch ever written.”

“Sir Max Beerbohm and Mgr Ronald Knox; each stands at the summit of his own art. They differ in scope. Where they attempt the same tasks, in parody, they are equal and supreme over all competitors. Sir Max has confined himself to the arts; Mgr Knox goes higher, to the loftiest regions of the human spirit. His Enthusiasm should be recognized as the greatest work of literary art of the century.”

“It is the peculiar temper of Firbank's humour which divides him from the nineties. His raw material, allowing for the inevitable changes of fashion, is almost identical with Oscar Wilde's – the lives of rich, slightly decadent people seen against a background of traditional culture, grand opera, the picture galleries and the Court; but Wilde's was at heart radically sentimental. His wit is ornamental; Firbank's is structural. Wilde is rococo; Firbank is baroque.”

“I began Rupert Brooke's poems and the memoir at the beginning. I was extraordinarily impressed, particularly by the letters – they, I think, bring out more than anything the situation I have tried to show in my editorial, that the beauty of living has gone out of the youngest generation... I felt very envious reading, particularly the parts about Rugby and friendship. I do honestly think that that is something that went out of the world in 1914, at least for one generation.”

“[T]here were a lot of Americans, headed by one called Gertrude Stein, who wrote absolute gibberish. Then they hired a poor dotty Irishman called James Joyce, if you’ve heard about him - he was thought to be a great influence in my youth - and he wrote absolute rot, you know. He began writing quite well and you can see him going mad as he wrote, and his last books - only fit to be set for examinations at Cambridge... [Y]ou could watch him going mad sentence by sentence. If you read Ulysses, it’s perfectly sane for a little bit, and then it goes madder and madder - but that was before the Americans hired him. And then they hired him to write Finnegan’s Wake, which is gibberish.”

“As expected, this year I most enjoyed The Letters of Evelyn Waugh... Altogether a saturnalia of wit, malice and imagination.”

“The Letters of Evelyn Waugh...tops non-fiction that has come my way: a feast of iconoclastic, intellectual entertainment; shrewd, tender, wicked; the man behind the work emerges in all his dazzling radiance of perception and prejudice, and his superb prose create a splendid commentary on his age and contemporaries.”

“You know what made me want to become a journalist? Reading Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop when I was about eleven. Enough to make anybody want to be a journalist! I absolutely adored it.”

“If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.”

“It is impossible to imagine getting a letter from Evelyn Waugh, unless it were of the "Mr Waugh deeply regrets that he is unable to do what is so kindly proposed" sort. In the first place, one would have to have a nursery nickname and be a member of White's, a Roman Catholic, a high-born lady or an Old Etonian novelist.”

“The lady said, "It's no good trying to buy a paper here. That Sir William Beveridge is going to abolish want, so all the papers were sold out". Later that day or the next day I asked him to come to lunch. I was meeting with Evelyn Waugh, an old friend and famous writer. They did not get on at all well. Evelyn Waugh said to him at the end, "How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William?" He paused and said, "I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it". Evelyn Waugh said, "I get mine spreading alarm and despondency" — this was in the height of the war — "and I get more satisfaction than you do". So he did not meet with universal acclamation, but nearly everyone admired Beveridge at that time. He was a wonderful man.”

“Examples of his deft use of the snob-joke could be multiplied almost indefinitely. It can be said indeed that if he were not a snob, if he were not the type of man who refers frequently to "the lower orders" (as he does in Labels) and objects to the presence of natives in first-class railway carriages (as he does in Waugh in Abyssinia) he could not have written such funny books. This is an unpleasant fact; it means that the countless liberal newstatesmanish people who have laughed over these books share unconsciously these prejudices.”

“The real motive force of neo-Toryism, giving it its nationalistic character and differentiating it from ordinary Conservatism, is the desire not to recognize that British power and influence have declined. Even those who are realistic enough to see that Britain’s military position is not what it was, tend to claim that ‘English ideas’ (usually left undefined) must dominate the world. All neo-Tories are anti-Russian, but sometimes the main emphasis is anti-American. The significant thing is that this school of thought seems to be gaining ground among youngish intellectual, sometimes ex-Communists, who have passed through the usual process of disillusionment and become disillusioned with that. The anglophobe who suddenly becomes violently pro-British is a fairly common figure. Writers who illustrate this tendency are F. A. Voigt, Malcolm Muggeridge, Evelyn Waugh, Hugh Kingsmill, and a psychologically similar development can be observed in T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and various of their followers.”

“If future generations want to know what the second world war was like for English people, they can safely turn to Sword of Honour by Evelyn Waugh (1965), the greatest work of a great English novelist.”

“Certainly one receives few impressions of any spontaneous gaiety or sweetness of nature, for which his friends remember him best, and which obviously made him such an agreeable companion. Similarly there have been few glimpses of the kindliness, or the sudden disarming gentleness, which members of his family most particularly remember.”

“In fact, the real problem with the thesis of A Genealogy of Morals is that the noble and the aristocrat are just as likely to be stupid as the plebeian. I had noted in my teens that major writers are usually those who have had to struggle against the odds — to "pull their cart out of the mud," as I put it — while writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate — or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems.”