Evelyn Waugh Quotes

Think about what artists, novelists and poets have in common: the ability to engage in metaphorical thinking, linking seemingly unrelated ideas, such as, 'It is the east, and Juliet is the Sun.'

Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.

Disciples be damned. It's not interesting. It's only the masters that matter. Those who create.

Mark Twain created a new type of literature and not a lot of people can say that. Not a lot of people can say they're absolutely original and completely self-made.

Nor ought a genius less than his that writ attempt translation.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence.

As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.

I don't think that genius goes hand in hand with being socially inept or being a sociopath or being a misanthrope, but I do think that it is a mind that can think so differently - so beyond how one is supposed to think.

There are very few people who are creative and imaginative. Therefore, fiction is difficult for people to embrace.

Possessing a healthy imagination is a necessary ingredient for creativity.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

To become a novelist, the most crucial thing one must do is read, read and read again - gradually you begin to think like a writer. Ideas are not found - they are shaped.

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir!

Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.

The cliche is dead poetry.

Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.

We have to think big. We have to imagine big, and that's part of the problem. We're letting other people imagine and lead us down what paths they want to take us. Sometimes they're very limited in the way their ideas are constructed. We need to imagine much more broadly. That's the work of a writer, and more writers should look at it.

I have abused language. I love it, and I abuse it... I don't write just to be clever. But sometimes I do. And if you don't have an understanding of the language, then the way in which it's bent doesn't actually register.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

I've always been blown away by how unique Brian Limond's mind is.

We are apt to consider that invention is the result of spontaneous action of some heavenborn genius, whose advent we must patiently wait for, but cannot artificially produce. It is unquestionable, however, that education, legal enactments, and general social conditions have a stupendous influence on the development of the originative faculty present in a nation and determine whether it shall be a fountain of new ideas or become simply a purchaser from others of ready-made inventions.

Madness in method, that's genius