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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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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
Necessary
Added
Fugitive
Understood
Properly
Functional
Style
Individuality
Decoration
Quality
Qualities
Permanence
Art
Letters
Nearest
Preservative
Three
Structure
Seductive
Ensures
Form
Essence
Combine
Lucidity
Work
Elements
Elegance
Approximation

More quotes by Evelyn Waugh

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Saints are simply men & women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God.
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Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying.
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When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.
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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
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I'm quite deaf now such a comfort.
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We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school.
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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.
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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.
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I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason that he is anxious to conceal.
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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.
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An artist must be a reactionary
Evelyn Waugh
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The languor of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost!
Evelyn Waugh
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It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.
Evelyn Waugh
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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.
Evelyn Waugh
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Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?
Evelyn Waugh
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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.
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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His heart some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word.
Evelyn Waugh
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He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.
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