Talk:Evelyn Waugh

I'm sure most of the "attributed" quotes have an easily identifiable source if only the diaries and letters were checked.

Unsourced

Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable, precise and verifiable source for any quote on this list please move it to Evelyn Waugh. --Antiquary 18:54, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

• I put the words down and push them around bit.

• I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.

• If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.

• In the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.

• Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.

• 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.

• My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.

• Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.

• One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

• Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

• Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.

• Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.

• Saints are simply men and women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God.

• The human mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with a similar energy. Is falsely attributed to Waugh. Actually from Wilfred Trotter, 1941 and is quoted by Beveridge, W. I. B, The Art of Scientific Investigation, London:Heinemann 1950 p. 108 - according to Koestler, The Art of Creation p.217

• The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.

• There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

• What a man enjoys about a woman's clothes are his fantasies of how she would look without them.

• What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?

• When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.

• Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.