Maugham then offers the greatest advice anyone could give to a young author: "At the end of an interrogation sentence, place a question mark. You'd be surprised how effective it can be."

The great question of philosophy remains: If life is meaningless, what can be done about alphabet soup?

A man that has never lied to a woman has no respect for her feelings.

Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.

Because it's much more pleasant to be obsessed over how the hero gets out of his predicament than it is over how I get out of mine.

I'm awash in self-contempt!

Men learn to love the woman they are attracted to. Women learn to become attracted to the man they fall in love with.