Top 300 Evelyn Waugh Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Ought we to be drunk every night?” Sebastian asked one morning. “Yes, I think so.” “I think so too.”

— Evelyn Waugh

202. “It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.”

— Evelyn Waugh

203. “He was talking very excitedly to me,” said the Vicar, “about some apparatus for warming a church in Worthing and about the Apostolic Claims of the Church of Abyssinia. I confess I could not follow him clearly. He seems deeply interested in Church matters. Are you quite sure he is right in the head? I have noticed again and again since I have been in the Church that lay interest in ecclesiastical matters is often a prelude to insanity.”

— Evelyn Waugh

204. “My father greeted me with his usual air of mild regret.”

— Evelyn Waugh

205. “I rejoiced in the Burgundy. It seemed a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St James’s Street in the first Autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime, the same words of hope.”

— Evelyn Waugh

206. “As my intimacy with his family grew, I became part of the world which he sought to escape; I became one of the bonds which held him.”

— Evelyn Waugh

207. “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

208. “The problem of architecture as I see it is the problem of all art – the elimination of the human element from the consideration of the form.”

— Evelyn Waugh

209. “But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can’t shut myself from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him. One can only hope to see one step ahead. But I saw today there was one thing unforgivable – like things in the schoolroom, so bad they are unpunishable, that only Mummy could deal with – the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I’m not quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God’s.”

— Evelyn Waugh

210. “I know I am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the Faith.”

— Evelyn Waugh

211. “I do not believe the expenditure of $2.50 for a book entitles the purchaser to the personal friendship of the author.”

— Evelyn Waugh

212. “It was during that term that I began to realise that Sebastian was a drunkard in quite a different sense to myself. I got drunk often, but through an excess of high spirits, in the love of the moment, and the wish to prolong and enchant it; Sebastian drank to escape.”

— Evelyn Waugh

213. “That day was the beginning of my friendship with Sebastian, and thus it came about, that morning in June, that I was lying beside him in the shade of the high elms watching the smoke from his lips drift up into the branches.”

— Evelyn Waugh

214. “The two drinks were brought in, poured out already in the glasses, like ‘doubles’ at a bar, and all our eyes followed the tray, as though we were dogs in a dining-room smelling game.”

— Evelyn Waugh

215. “But the wood has endured. In splinters and shavings, gorgeously encased, it has traveled the world over and found a joyous welcome among every race. For it states a fact. Hounds are checked, hunting wild. A horn calls clear through the covert. Helena casts them back on the scent. Above all the babble of her age and ours, she makes one blunt assertion. And there alone lies Hope.”

— Evelyn Waugh

216. “There was a regulation that if they remained at large in enemy territory for some weeks longer, they could be repatriated to the United States. It was for this that they had made a hazardous parachute jump and destroyed an expensive, very slightly damaged aeroplane.”

— Evelyn Waugh

217. “I rejoiced in the Burgundy. It seemed a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his.”

— Evelyn Waugh

218. “I never can understand how two men can write a book together; to me that’s like three people getting together to have a baby.”

— Evelyn Waugh

219. “The languor of Youth – how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrevocably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth – all save this – come and go with us through life.”

— Evelyn Waugh

220. “Edith and Olive and me have talked it over and we want to go and make aeroplanes.”

— Evelyn Waugh

221. “I’ve always had two principles throughout all my life in motion-pictures: never do before the camera what you would not do at home and never do at home what you would not do before the camera.”

— Evelyn Waugh

222. “He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.”

— Evelyn Waugh

223. “Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in Old Maid; the player who is finally with it has lost.”

— Evelyn Waugh

224. “MGM bores me when I see them, but I don’t see them much. They have been a help in getting me introductions to morticians, who are the only people worth knowing.”

— Evelyn Waugh

225. “It was his misfortune to be respected as a writer by almost everyone except those with whom he most consorted.”

— Evelyn Waugh

226. “Instruction would be wasted on me. Just to give me the form and I’ll sign on the dotted line.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

228. “Next morning at first light to Guy’s surprise the troopship at last emerged from the haze of myth and was seen to be solidly at anchor beyond the mouth of the harbor.”

— Evelyn Waugh

229. “Most English gentlemen at this time believed that they had a particular aptitude for endearing themselves to the lower classes. Guy was not troubled by this illusion, but he believed he was rather liked by these particular thirty men. He did not greatly care.”

— Evelyn Waugh

230. “There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.”

— Evelyn Waugh

231. “In the week which preceded the outbreak of the Second World War – days of surmise and apprehension which cannot, without irony, be called the last days of peace – and on the Sunday morning when all doubts were finally resolved and misconceptions corrected, three rich women thought first and mainly of Basil Seal.”

— Evelyn Waugh

232. “He was not at all what is called ‘a character’. He was an innocent, affable old man who had somehow preserved his good humor – much more than that, a mysterious and tranquil joy – throughout a life which to all outward observation had been overloaded with misfortune. He had like many another been born in full sunlight and lived to see night fall.”

— Evelyn Waugh

233. “There are two distinct kinds of meanness – those which come of loving money and of disliking it. Mine was the latter sort.”

— Evelyn Waugh

234. “As ants, so soldiers. In the years to come he was to see the process at work again and again, sometimes in grim circumstances, sometimes in pleasant domesticity. Men unnaturally removed from wives and family began at once to build substitute homes, to paint and furnish, to make flower-beds and edge them with white-washed pebbles, to stitch cushion-covers on lonely gun-sites.”

— Evelyn Waugh

235. “As there was no form of government common to the peoples thus segregated, nor tie of language, history, habit or belief, they were called a Republic.”

— Evelyn Waugh

236. “The way ran zigzag through a forest of pine which the bitter wind, still that morning, had turned to ice; every bough was adorned with lines of stalactite which shivered and glittered in the morning sun; every needle had a brilliant, vitreous case and when she flicked her whip at a wayside shrub she brought down a tinkling shower of ice-leaves, each the veined impression of its crisp, green counterpart.”

— Evelyn Waugh

237. “I am sorry to disturb you,′ said James politely, ’but these people wished to shoot us.”

— Evelyn Waugh

238. “There was a change in both of us. We had lost a sense of discovery which had infused the anarchy of our first year.”

— Evelyn Waugh

239. “It was a small tortoise with Julia’s initials set in diamonds in the living shell, and this slightly obscene object, now slipping impotently on the polished boards, now striding across the card-table, now lumbering over a rug, now withdrawn at a touch, now stretching its neck and swaying its withered, antediluvian head, became a memorable part of the evening, one of those needlehooks of experience which catch the attention when larger matters are at stake.”

— Evelyn Waugh

240. “I don’t know what it means, but I didn’t mean it.”

— Evelyn Waugh

241. “I always maintain a certain privacy on the sea. One so easily forms acquaintances which become tedious later.”

— Evelyn Waugh

242. “Guy left the office unashamed. He felt shaken, as though he had seen a road accident in which he was not concerned. His fingers shook but it was nerves not conscience which troubled him; he was familiar with shame; this trembling, hopeless sense of disaster was something of quite another order; something that would pass and leave no mark.”

— Evelyn Waugh

243. “Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches.”

— Evelyn Waugh

244. “To Father Rothschild no passage was worse than any other. He thought of the sufferings of the saints, the mutability of human nature, the Four Last Things, and between whiles repeated snatches of the penitential psalms.”

— Evelyn Waugh

245. “How could I have known? There seemed time for everything in those days; the world was open to be explored at leisure.”

— Evelyn Waugh

246. “Yes I am poor man. When I was very young I used often to be drunk. Now it is very seldom. Once or two times in the year. But always I do something I am very sorry for. I think perhaps I shall get drunk tonight,” he suggested, brightening.”

— Evelyn Waugh

247. “Here my last love died. There was nothing remarkable in the manner of its death.”

— Evelyn Waugh

248. “Ned”, he said, “there is one thing I must beg of you. Always wear a tall hat on Sundays during term. It is by that, more than anything, that a man is judged.”

— Evelyn Waugh

249. “I returned to London in the spring of 1926 for the General Strike. It was the topic of Paris. The French, exultant as always at the discomfiture of their former friends, and transposing into their own precise terms our mistier notions from across the Channel, foretold revolution and civil.”

— Evelyn Waugh

250. “Who asked you to the funeral anyway? Were you acquainted with the late parrot?”

— Evelyn Waugh