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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
Tables
Think
Thinking
Like
Oversensitive
Cliches
Cliche
Manners
Table

More quotes by Evelyn Waugh

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The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness!
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I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.
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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.
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Once you start changing a name, you see, there's no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.
Evelyn Waugh
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Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.
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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.
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One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page.
Evelyn Waugh
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From the earliest times the Welsh have been looked upon as an unclean people. It is thus that they have preserved their racial integrity. Their sons and daughters rarely mate with humankind except their own blood relations.
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Saints are simply men & women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God.
Evelyn Waugh
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Now we shall both be alone, and I shall have no way of making you understand.' 'I don't want to make it easier for you,' I said 'I hope your heart may break but I do understand.
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I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.
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The worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean starting a life with you, without Him. Julia to Charles
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To understand all is to forgive all.
Evelyn Waugh
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The languor of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost!
Evelyn Waugh
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Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.
Evelyn Waugh
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I think there's almost nothing I can't excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.
Evelyn Waugh
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I'm quite deaf now such a comfort.
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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His heart some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word.
Evelyn Waugh
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The better sort of Ishmaelites have been Christian for many centuries and will not publicly eat human flesh uncooked in Lent, without special and costly dispensation from their bishop.
Evelyn Waugh