W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.

Remember that it is nothing to do your duty, that is demanded of you and is no more meritorious than to wash your hands when they are dirty; the only thing that counts is the love of duty; when love and duty are one, then grace is in you and you will enjoy a happiness which passes all understanding.

Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.

When I was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask me to stay with him in the country. He was a religious man and he read prayers to the assembled household every morning. But he had crossed out in pencil all the passages that praised God. He said that there was nothing so vulgar as to praise people to their faces and, himself a gentleman, he could not believe that God was so ungentlemanly as to like it.

Great writers create; writers of smaller gifts copy

What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?

A good rule for writers: do not explain overmuch.

She’s wonderful. Tell her I’ve never seen such beautiful hands. I wonder what she sees in you.” Waddington, smiling, translated the question. “She says I’m good.” “As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue,” Kitty mocked.

The humour of Dostoievsky is the humour of a barloafer who ties a kettle to a dog's tail.

Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.

Throw yourself into the hurly-burly of life. It doesn't matter how many mistakes you make, what unhappiness you have to undergo. It is all your material ... Don't wait for experience to come to you; go out after experience. Experience is your material.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

It's always difficult to make conversation with a drunk, and there's no denying it, the sober are at a disadvantage with him.

Dullness is the first requisite of a good husband.

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

Tolerance is another word for indifference.

I never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull.

I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.

The humorist has a good eye for the humbug; he does not always recognize the saint.

Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.

Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose.

The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so, and by the manipulation of his plot, he can engage the reader's attention so that he does not perceive the violence that has been done to him.

Sherry, the civilized drink.

It is unfair to expect a politician to live in private up to the statements he makes in public.

There is no more merit in being able to attach a correct description to a picture than in being able to find out what is wrong with a stalled motorcar. In each case it is special knowledge.

This love was a torment, and he resented bitterly the subjugation in which it held him; he was a prisoner and he longed for freedom. Sometimes he awoke in the morning and felt nothing; his soul leaped, for he thought he was free; he loved no longer; but in a little while, as he grew wide awake, the pain settled in his heart, and he knew that he was not cured yet.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

If truth is a value it is because it is true and not because it is brave to speak it.

But what is criticism? Criticism is purely destructive; anyone can destroy, but not everyone can build up.

When we come to judge others it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them, but by an image that we have formed of ourselves from which we have left out everything that offends our vanity or would discredit us in the eyes of the world.

You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

We didn't think much in the air corps of a fellow who wangled a cushy job out of his C.O. by buttering him up. It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery. I should have thought the worship most pleasing to him was to do your best according to your lights.

Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.

It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set.

Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.

Writing is a wholetime job: no professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it.

It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me.

It is a nuisance that knowledge can only be acquired by hard work.

I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing.

Self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion.

The ballet. I saw in the fugitive beauty of a dancer's gesture a symbol of life. It was achieved at the cost of unending effort but, with all the forces of gravity against it, a fleeting poise in mid-air, a lovely attitude worthy to be made immortal in a bas-relief, it was lost as soon as it was gained and there remained no more than the memory of an exquisite emotion. So life, lived variously and largely, becomes a work of art only when brought to its beautiful conclusion and is reduced to nothingness in the moment when it arrives at perfection.

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.

Only mediocre people are at the best all the time.

Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that this is neither innocent or praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I. Conversation after a time bores me, games tire me and my own thoughts, which we are told are the unfailing resource of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to my book as the opium-smoker to his pipe.

Men have ascribed to God imperfections that they would deplore in themselves.