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The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.
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
Trying
Atheism
Mind
Literature
Heaven
Horrors
Comes
Inventing
Shows
Invent
Human
Tries
Humans
Horror
Enough
Inspired
More quotes by Evelyn Waugh
News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read.
Evelyn Waugh
Beware of writing to me. I always answer ... My father spent the last 20 years of his life writing letters. If someone thanked him for a wedding present, he thanked them for thanking him and there was no end to the exchange but death.
Evelyn Waugh
If one's object is ascetic, it is far better to stay in London or Paris or New York there is practically no extreme of heat or cold, physical risk, loneliness, hunger or thirst that cannot, with a little ingenuity, be conveniently achieved in the centres of civilization.
Evelyn Waugh
He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole.
Evelyn Waugh
Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
Evelyn Waugh
She told me later that she had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a particular book, one will sometimes have one's attention caught by another, take it down, glance at the title page and saying I must read that, too, when I've the time, replace it and continue the search.
Evelyn Waugh
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
If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough there to fill a full lifetime with delight. Venice, with all its complexity and variety, is in itself the greatest surviving work of art in the world.
Evelyn Waugh
The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn't know existed.
Evelyn Waugh
... 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
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
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.
Evelyn Waugh
Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.
Evelyn Waugh
His heart some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word.
Evelyn Waugh
There is no ordinary run of mankind, there are only individuals who are totally different. And whether a man is naked and black and stands on one foot in Sudan or is clothed in some kind of costume in a bus in England, they are still individuals of entirely different characters.
Evelyn Waugh
I think there's almost nothing I can't excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.
Evelyn Waugh
Remember that, however patient your study, you will never in adult life learn any language perfectly the best you can hope for is to be a bore.
Evelyn Waugh
Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.
Evelyn Waugh
that is not the last word it is not even an apt word it is a dead word from ten years back.
Evelyn Waugh
The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.
Evelyn Waugh
