Evelyn Waugh People Quotations

...its a rather pleasant change when all your life you've had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me.

I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.

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

The audiences certainly have [declined]. If I go to the theatre now I find people come there to eat and smoke and talk to one another. And look like scarecrows.

They are a very decent generous lot of people out here and they don't expect you to listen.... It's the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.

I am annoyed to find myself continually described by people whom I have never set eyes on as bad-tempered.

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.

You spend the first term at Oxford meeting interesting and exciting people and the rest of your time there avoiding them

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn't know existed.

You can't ever tell what's going to hurt people.

The great charm in argument is really finding one's own opinions, not other people's.

His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death.

It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.

I don't believe that people would ever fall in love or want to be married if they hadn't been told about it. It's like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn't been told it existed.