Evelyn Waugh

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

I haven't been to sleep for over a year. That's why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn't sleep.

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

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief.

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.

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

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

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.

I put the words down and push them a bit.

Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.

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

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.

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

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

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

News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.

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