No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichรฉs that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. ... The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood.
W. Somerset MaughamYou will have to learn many tedious things,...which you will forget the moment you have passed your final examination, but in anatomy it is better to have learned and lost than never to have learned at all.
W. Somerset MaughamThe humorist has a good eye for the humbug; he does not always recognize the saint.
W. Somerset MaughamHeaven knows what pains the author has been at, what bitter experience he has endured and what heartache suffered, to give some chance reader a few hours' relaxation or to while away the tedium of a journey.
W. Somerset MaughamWomen are often under the impression that men are much more madly in love with them than they really are.
W. Somerset MaughamPeople do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are.
W. Somerset Maugham