Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Art
Question
Assumptions
Past
Present
Options
Must
Stand
Assumption
Reassess
Think
Situation
Situations
Flopping
Thinking
Age
Helps
Tenor
Future
Group
Tenors
Artist
Along
Reactionary
Helping
Groups
Reactionaries

More quotes by Evelyn Waugh

Image
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
Image
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
Image
Free as air that's what they say- free as air. Now they bring me my air in an iron barrel.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
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
Image
For in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
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
Image
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?
Evelyn Waugh
Image
If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be
Evelyn Waugh
Image
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
Image
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.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
We are American at puberty. We die French.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher
Evelyn Waugh
Image
The sky over London was glorious, ochre and madder, as though a dozen tropic suns were simultaneously setting round the horizon . . . Everywhere the shells sparkled like Christmas baubles.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
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
Image
Beerbohm was a genius of the purest kind. He stands at the summit of his art.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
He did not fail in love, but he lost the joy of it [...]
Evelyn Waugh
Image
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