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It is typical of Oxford, I said, to start the new year in autumn.

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
Oxford
Typical
Autumn
Year
Start
Years

More quotes by 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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To understand all is to forgive all.
Evelyn Waugh
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Its theme-- the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters-- was perhaps presumptuously large, but I make no apology for it.
Evelyn Waugh
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News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read.
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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
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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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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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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
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I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.
Evelyn Waugh
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Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.
Evelyn Waugh
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Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in 'Old Maid' the player who is finally left with it has lost.
Evelyn Waugh
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Properly understood, style is not a seductive decoration added to a functional structure it is of the essence of a work of art. The necessary elements of style are lucidity, elegance, and individuality these three qualities combine to form a preservative which ensures the nearest approximation to permanence in the fugitive art of letters.
Evelyn Waugh
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We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them...
Evelyn Waugh
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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
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Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.
Evelyn Waugh
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Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.
Evelyn Waugh
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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
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The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.
Evelyn Waugh
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I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.
Evelyn Waugh
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If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be
Evelyn Waugh