431 Quotes by Evelyn Waugh

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.

Brenda descended the great staircase step by step through alternations of dusk and rainbow.

It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire.

It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one’s stature on the edge of the door.

If we can’t stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.

Above all the babble of her age and ours, she makes one blunt assertion. And there alone lies Hope.

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.

Once you start changing a name, you see, there’s no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.

Do you know last year, when I thought I was going to have a child, I’d decided to have it brought up a Catholic? I hadn’t thought about religion before; I haven’t since; but just at that time, when I was was waiting for the birth, I thought, ‘That’s the one thing I can give her. It doesn’t seem to have done me much good, but my child shall have it.’ It was odd, wanting to give something one had lost oneself.