10 Evelyn Waugh Quotes on Writing

Evelyn Waugh quotes on writing

11. Don't give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can't express them. Don't analyze yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.

14. He had no wish to obliterate anything he had written, but he would dearly have liked to revise it, envying painters, who are allowed to return to the same theme time and time again, clarifying and enriching until they have done all they can with it. A novelist is condemned to provide a succession of novelties, new names for characters, new incidents for his plots, new scenery; but; Mr Pinfold maintained, most men harbour the germs of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters - Dickens and Balzac even - were flagrantly guilty.

16. Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

17. I put the words down and push them a bit.

25. There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit.

33. While still a young man, John Courteney Boot had, as his publisher proclaimed, 'achieved an assured and enviable position in contemporary letters.'

49. My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.

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

72. There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

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