Art & Creativity Quote by Evelyn Waugh

Waugh’s barb lands because it targets not bad writers, but the coping mechanisms of the people paid to endure them. The line is constructed like a diagnosis: “in the course of duty” turns reviewing into bureaucratic labor, then “unhealthy craving” medicalizes the reviewer’s palate. After enough drudgery, the critic stops hungering for truth about books and starts chasing the stimulant: the “arresting phrase,” the one-liner that can jolt an audience awake and make a column feel alive.

The subtext is quietly cruel. Waugh implies that criticism, under industrial conditions, becomes less an act of judgment than a form of self-preservation. If you’re forced to ingest mediocrity at scale, style becomes a substitute for substance; you can’t reliably discover greatness, so you manufacture the sensation of it in your own prose. “Arresting” is the key word: it suggests both attention-grabbing and punitive. The phrase doesn’t just stop the reader; it handcuffs the book to the reviewer’s performance.

Context matters: Waugh wrote from inside a literary culture where reputation traveled through reviews and where the critic’s voice could eclipse the work. His suspicion also flatters the novelist’s craft. He’s warning that a marketplace of constant commentary incentivizes critics to value the quotable over the accurate, the pungent over the fair. It’s a sentence about incentives masquerading as a joke, and it still fits an era where takes are rewarded more than reading.