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I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.

Evelyn Waugh

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Evelyn Waugh
Age: 62 †
Born: 1903
Born: October 28
Died: 1966
Died: April 10
Autobiographer
Diarist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
War Correspondent
Writer
Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh
Cliche
Manners
Table
Tables
Think
Thinking
Like
Oversensitive
Cliches

More quotes by Evelyn Waugh

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... the understatement, the self-ridicule, the delight in the foreignness of foreigners, the complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited.
Evelyn Waugh
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Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.
Evelyn Waugh
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We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school.
Evelyn Waugh
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I've always had two principles throughout all my life in motion-pictures: never do before the camera what you would not do at home and never do at home what you would not do before the camera.
Evelyn Waugh
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His heart some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word.
Evelyn Waugh
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My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.
Evelyn Waugh
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For in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.
Evelyn Waugh
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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.
Evelyn Waugh
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It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
Evelyn Waugh
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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.
Evelyn Waugh
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There are no poetic ideas only poetic utterances.
Evelyn Waugh
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Enclosing every thin man, there's a fat man demanding elbow-room.
Evelyn Waugh
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My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.
Evelyn Waugh
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Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.
Evelyn Waugh
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I [had] added another small piece to the pages of the atlas that were real to me.
Evelyn Waugh
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When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning.
Evelyn Waugh
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Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.
Evelyn Waugh
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Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher
Evelyn Waugh
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The sky over London was glorious, ochre and madder, as though a dozen tropic suns were simultaneously setting round the horizon . . . Everywhere the shells sparkled like Christmas baubles.
Evelyn Waugh
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An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor [group think] of the age and not go flopping along. By doing this he helps us to question and reassess our past, present and future situations, our assumptions and our options.
Evelyn Waugh