A Quote by Whit Stillman

Decline and Fall was a very depressing Evelyn Waugh novel, I think it was his first. I didn't get it at all, and then I got to love Waugh. And I think that maybe "Cosmopolitans" has a bit of an Evelyn Waugh vibe to it at some point.

Whit Stillman

Quote Topics

Bit Decline Depressing Fall First Get Got His Love Maybe Novel Point Some Then Think To Love Very Very Depressing Vibe

Quote Author

Whit Stillman
American - Director
Born: January 25, 1952

I think when I was 12, I started reading Evelyn Waugh, and I loved Evelyn Waugh so much, and I thought: 'This is how the world really is. If I could be Evelyn Waugh, then I would be happy.'

Candace Bushnell

Evelyn Waugh: How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William? Sir William Beveridge: I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it. Waugh: I get mine spreading alarm and despondency and I get more satisfaction than you do.

Evelyn Waugh

My go-to author for knowing it all is Evelyn Waugh. 'A Handful of Dust' is as perfect as a book can get.

Laurie Graham

I sometimes think if I had gone to Oxford or Cambridge and looked like a handsome young guy who could be in an Evelyn Waugh novel or something, I'd be a massive movie star. But there's a longevity to what I do. It's more reliable. Someone isn't deciding that I'm the next big thing.

Eddie Marsan

[Evelyn Waugh] made drunkenness cute and chic, and then took to religion, simply to have the most expensive carpet of all to be sick on.

Rebecca West

When I began to read as an adult, my first big enthusiasm was Evelyn Waugh. I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date.

Hilary Mantel

Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.

A. S. Byatt

The Catholic Church with its foreshortened American history and tangled puritanical roots was as inviolate to my mother and father as it was to the last-ditch aristocrats of Evelyn Waugh.

Maureen Howard

I love satire. Evelyn Waugh is one of my favorite writers of all time. He's hilarious. He's so wicked. He's so great. On the other hand, pure satire is an imitation. It doesn't really have any heart. It only holds things up to ridicule.

T.C. Boyle

Harcourt sent my book to Evelyn Waugh and his comment was: “If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.” My mother was vastly insulted. She put the emphasis on if and lady. Does he suppose you’re not a lady? she says.

Flannery O'Connor

I don't feel when I'm writing that I'm drawing from any other writer, but of course I must be. The writers I've admired have been not so very different from myself: Evelyn Waugh, for example, that kind of crystalline prose. And I've always admired W. Somerset Maugham more than any other writer.

Charles McCarry

Evelyn Waugh was in error when he said that in New York there was a neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistook for energy. There was, rather, a tensile excitement in the air which made one think - made me think for many years - that time spent asleep in New York was somehow time wasted. Whether this thought has lengthened or shortened my life I shall never know, but it has certainly colored it.

Christopher Hitchens

The book[ The Thorn and The Blossom] is a love story about two people, Brendan and Evelyn, who meet in a small town in Cornwall where Evelyn has gone on vacation and Brendan is working in his father's bookstore. The story is told from both perspectives, Brendan's and Evelyn's.

Theodora Goss

Adam Gilchrist and Ricky Ponting are anything but conventional, and you can't frown on Steve Waugh for playing his slog-sweep because it's so effective.