Quote

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

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
Learn
Bores
Language
Adult
Remember
Perfectly
Best
Patient
Never
Adults
Life
However
Study
Hope
Bore

More quotes by Evelyn Waugh

Image
There are no poetic ideas only poetic utterances.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
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
Image
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.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
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
Image
that is not the last word it is not even an apt word it is a dead word from ten years back.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
An artist must be a reactionary
Evelyn Waugh
Image
Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
Beerbohm was a genius of the purest kind. He stands at the summit of his art.
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
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 have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately of what was in season, drunk fine claret, slept in my own sheets I shall live long.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
Have you at any time been detained in a mental home or similar institution? If so, give particulars.' 'I was at Scone College, Oxford, for two years,' said Paul.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them...
Evelyn Waugh