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You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.

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
Without
Supernatural
Much
Hardly
Would
Aids
Catholic
Idea
Ideas
Human
Humans
Nastier

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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.
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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.
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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.
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There are no poetic ideas only poetic utterances.
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Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has natural happiness without the beatific vision no harps no communal order but wine and conversation and imperfect, various humanity. Limbo for the unbaptized, for the pious heathen, the sincere sceptic.
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Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.
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Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love it kills art I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.
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Saints are simply men & women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God.
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Beer commercials are so patriotic: Made the American Way. What does that have to do with America? Is that what America stands for? Feeling sluggish and urinating frequently?
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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.
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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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I think there's almost nothing I can't excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.
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For in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.
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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.
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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.
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I have no technical psychological interest it is drama, speech,and events that interest me.
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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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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.
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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