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Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.

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
Course
Arresting
Books
Reviewers
Literature
Unhealthy
Read
Craving
Book
Phrases
Many
Professional
Duty
Courses

More quotes by Evelyn Waugh

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MGM bores me when I see them, but I don't see them much. They have been a help in getting me introductions to morticians, who are the only people worth knowing.
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.
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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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If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be
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The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness!
Evelyn Waugh
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I am suing Lord Beaverbrook for libel and hope for some lovely tax-free money in damages. He has very conveniently told some lies about me.
Evelyn Waugh
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There are no poetic ideas only poetic utterances.
Evelyn Waugh
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You don't remove the evil in a person by killing the person.
Evelyn Waugh
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You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.
Evelyn Waugh
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Beerbohm was a genius of the purest kind. He stands at the summit of his art.
Evelyn Waugh
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But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.
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
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There is something incomparably thrilling in first opening a brand new book.
Evelyn Waugh
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Of children as of procreation -- the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable
Evelyn Waugh
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He did not fail in love, but he lost the joy of it [...]
Evelyn Waugh
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I never can understand how two men can write a book together to me that's like three people getting together to have a baby.
Evelyn Waugh
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Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.
Evelyn Waugh
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Conversation should be like juggling up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.
Evelyn Waugh
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Here I am,' I thought, 'back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity.
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