"I put the words down and push them a bit"
About this Quote
Writing, for Evelyn Waugh, isn’t a mystical calling; it’s manual labor with a wicked grin. “I put the words down and push them a bit” deflates the romantic myth of inspiration in nine brisk syllables, replacing it with an image closer to a furniture mover than a prophet. Waugh is telling you how the trick is done: draft first, then shove the language until it lands where it needs to land.
The phrasing is pure Waugh in its casual brutality. “Put” is almost contemptuously plain, as if sentences are just objects to be stacked. “Push” is where the artistry hides, and the subtext is that style is not decoration but pressure: compression, timing, the calibrated nudge that turns observation into bite. It also smuggles in Waugh’s moral temperament. His novels often take a dim view of modern sentimentality and social earnestness; “push them a bit” suggests that raw feeling isn’t trustworthy until it’s disciplined, made exact, maybe made funny at its own expense.
Context matters: Waugh wrote in a Britain where class performance, religious seriousness, and public manners were constantly being negotiated, then shattered by war and its aftermath. His satire works because it’s engineered. This line is a tiny manifesto for that engineering: the writer as craftsman, yes, but also as provocateur, applying just enough force to make the façade crack. The modesty is strategic; it’s how a cynic admits, without admitting, how hard he’s working.
The phrasing is pure Waugh in its casual brutality. “Put” is almost contemptuously plain, as if sentences are just objects to be stacked. “Push” is where the artistry hides, and the subtext is that style is not decoration but pressure: compression, timing, the calibrated nudge that turns observation into bite. It also smuggles in Waugh’s moral temperament. His novels often take a dim view of modern sentimentality and social earnestness; “push them a bit” suggests that raw feeling isn’t trustworthy until it’s disciplined, made exact, maybe made funny at its own expense.
Context matters: Waugh wrote in a Britain where class performance, religious seriousness, and public manners were constantly being negotiated, then shattered by war and its aftermath. His satire works because it’s engineered. This line is a tiny manifesto for that engineering: the writer as craftsman, yes, but also as provocateur, applying just enough force to make the façade crack. The modesty is strategic; it’s how a cynic admits, without admitting, how hard he’s working.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by Evelyn
Add to List
