Top 100 Quotes About Somerset Maugham
#1. I don't feel when I'm writing that I'm drawing from any other writer, but of course I must be. The writers I've admired have been not so very different from myself: Evelyn Waugh, for example, that kind of crystalline prose. And I've always admired W. Somerset Maugham more than any other writer.
Charles McCarry
#2. It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. - SOMERSET MAUGHAM
Sarah Ban Breathnach
#3. Somerset Maugham said that it took at least six human beings to make one fictional character. That is true of landscape as well, I think. We have to make our landscapes, change streets, create new turnings, rebuild or tear down, change time, and even nature, if need be.
Mary Lee Settle
#4. At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham's 'Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.' To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester's works and the little urn that contains my mother's ashes.
Wilbur Smith
#5. Somebody asked Somerset Maugham about his place in the pantheon of writers, and he said, "I'm in the very front row of the second rate." I'm sort of haunted by that.
Stephen King
#6. It doesn't matter if I'm only to be gone four days, as in this case; I take six months' supply of reading material everywhere. Anyone who needs further explication of this eccentricity can find it usefully set out in the first pages of W. Somerset Maugham's story The Book-Bag.
Robin McKinley
#7. I read books more than I go out. As a matter of fact, I get a little concerned about some of my anti-social habits. I will choose a night with Somerset Maugham or Russell Banks over a crowded bar any day.
Julie Bowen
#8. Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.
W. Somerset Maugham
W. Somerset Maugham
#9. I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel.
Martin Amis
#10. It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.
Gore Vidal
#11. How much less is the sense of obligation in those
who receive favours than in those who grant them. Somerset Maugham
W. Somerset Maugham
#12. You can never know enough abut your characters. W. Somerset Maugham
Bette McNicholas
#13. It is said Somerset Maugham traveled the world with a notebook to learn the essence of life and Kafka sat in a room for the same objective. Yet Kafka came out with a better world-view.
U.R. Ananthamurthy
#14. Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that "Nobody is any better than he ought to be." ... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.
Norman Mailer
#15. The modern writer who has influenced me most is W. Somerset Maugham .
George Orwell
#16. And then the critics, going back to the novels of his maturity, found that their English had a nervous, racy vigour that eminently suited the matter.
W. Somerset Maugham
#17. Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure.
W. Somerset Maugham
#19. A dictator must fool all the people all the time and there's only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.
W. Somerset Maugham
#20. The belief in God, is not a matter of common sense or logic or argument, but of feeling. it is as impossible to prove the existence of God as to disprove it. I do not believe in God. I see no need of such an idea .
W. Somerset Maugham
#21. Life was not so horrible if it was meaningless, and he faced it with a strange sense of power. CIX
W. Somerset Maugham
#22. Man has always found it easier to sacrifice his life than to learn the multiplication table.
W. Somerset Maugham
#23. A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life.
W. Somerset Maugham
#24. Women are strange little beasts,' he said to Dr. Coutras. 'You can treat them like dogs, you can beat them till your arm aches, and still they love you.' He shrugged his shoulders. 'Of course, it is one of the most absurd illusions of Christianity that they have souls.
W. Somerset Maugham
#26. The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.
W. Somerset Maugham
#27. A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.
W. Somerset Maugham
#28. Well, Henry, if I were you I wouldn't worry", said the lawyer. "My belief is that your boy's born lucky, and in the long run that's better than to be born clever or rich.
W. Somerset Maugham
#29. Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.
W. Somerset Maugham
#30. I have always wondered at the passion many people have to meet the celebrated. The prestige you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves only that you are yourself of small account
W. Somerset Maugham
#31. Some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not.
W. Somerset Maugham
#32. Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical.
W. Somerset Maugham
#34. Oh, it's always the same,' she sighed, 'if you want men to behave well to you, you must be beastly to them; if you treat them decently they make you suffer for it.
W. Somerset Maugham
#35. Himself an ugly man, insignificant
of appearance, he prized very highly comeliness in others.
W. Somerset Maugham
#36. Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant.
W. Somerset Maugham
#37. In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time.
W. Somerset Maugham
#40. She gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she put into her answer.
You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!
W. Somerset Maugham
#41. Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.
W. Somerset Maugham
#43. There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W. Somerset Maugham
#44. His love became a prison from which he longed to escape, but he had not the strength merely to open the door-that was all it needed-and walk out into the open air. It was torture and at last he became numb and hopeless.
W. Somerset Maugham
#45. I've been quite happy. Look, here are my proofs. Remember that I am indifferent to discomforts which would harass other folk. What do the circumstances of life matter if your dreams make you lord paramount of time and space?
W. Somerset Maugham
#46. Music-hall songs provide the dull with wit, just as proverbs provide them with wisdom.
W. Somerset Maugham
#47. The novel may stimulate you to think. It may satisfy your aesthetic sense. It may arouse your moral emotions. But if it does not entertain you it is a bad novel.
W. Somerset Maugham
#48. No woman is worth more than a fiver unless you're in love with her. Then she's worth all she costs you.
W. Somerset Maugham
#49. I shall beat you,' he said, looking at her.
How else should I know you loved me,' she answered.
W. Somerset Maugham
#54. Any nation that thinks more of its ease and comfort than its freedom will soon lose its freedom; and the ironical thing about it is that it will lose its ease and comfort too.
W. Somerset Maugham
#55. How can I be reasonable? To me our love was everything and you were my whole life. It is not very pleasant to realize that to you it was only an episode.
W. Somerset Maugham
#57. And what else is it that men seek in life but power? If they want money, it is but for the power that attends it, and it is power again that they strive for in all the knowledge they acquire. Fools and sots aim at happiness, but men aim only at power.
W. Somerset Maugham
#58. Perhaps the most important use of money - It saves time. Life is so short, and there's so much to do, one can't afford to waste a minute; and just think how much you waste, for instance, in walking from place to place instead of going by bus and in going by bus instead of by taxi.
W. Somerset Maugham
#59. It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. - Of Human Bondage
W. Somerset Maugham
#61. People don't want reasons to do what they'd like to. They want excuses.
W. Somerset Maugham
#62. Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.
W. Somerset Maugham
#63. He had thought of love as a rapture which seized one so that all the world seemed spring-like, he had looked forward to an ecstatic happiness; but this was not happiness; it was a hunger of the soul, it was a painful yearning, it was a bitter anguish, he had never known before.
W. Somerset Maugham
#64. It speaks very well for human nature that with the masses of dear friends we have it's only to-day that one of them broke the news to us.
W. Somerset Maugham
#66. Dying is the most hellishly boresome experience in the world! Particularly when it entails dying of 'natural causes'.
W. Somerset Maugham
#67. He seemed to see his fellow creatures grotesquely, and he was angry with them because they were grotesque; life was a confusion of ridiculous, sordid happenings, a fit subject for laughter, and yet it made him sorrowful to laugh.
W. Somerset Maugham
#68. It's no good trying to keep up old friendships. It's painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it.
W. Somerset Maugham
#69. He realized that he was manacled hand and foot with fetters that were only more intolerable because they consisted of nothing more substantial than the dread of causing pain.
W. Somerset Maugham
#71. You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance.
W. Somerset Maugham
#72. Though he believed implicitly everything he saw in print, he had learned already that in the Bible things that said one thing quite clearly often mysteriously meant another.
W. Somerset Maugham
#73. From the standpoint of what eternity is it better to have read a thousand books than to have ploughed a million furrows?
W. Somerset Maugham
#74. She would not risk to grow so fond of her home that it was a pain to leave it; she preferred to remain a wayfarer, sauntering through life with a heart keen to detect beauty, and a mind, open and unbiased, ready to laugh at the absurd.
W. Somerset Maugham
#75. Perfect is determined in shortened measures of time, not over long periods of time or lifetimes. It would be unnatural.
W. Somerset Maugham
#77. I tried to picture to myself the mosque before the Christians laid their desecrating hands upon it.
W. Somerset Maugham
#78. I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me.
W. Somerset Maugham
#79. We were staggered and immediately on the defensive, for she looked intellectual, and it made us feel shy.
W. Somerset Maugham
#80. The secret of play-writing can be given in two maxims: stick to the point, and, whenever you can, cut.
W. Somerset Maugham
#82. Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.
W. Somerset Maugham
#83. She had added medicine because her brother-in-law practised it, but did not forget that in her young days no one ever considered the doctor a gentleman. The
William Somerset Maugham
#84. The gardener, an old sailor, made him a hammock and fixed it up for him in the branches of a weeping willow. And here for long hours he lay, hidden from anyone who might come to the vicarage, reading, reading passionately.
W. Somerset Maugham
#85. I do not like these painted faces that look all alike; and I think women are foolish to dull their expression and obscure their personality with powder, rouge, and lipstick.
W. Somerset Maugham
#86. I do not know what put the idea of China into his head, but at first he must have thrust it aside with violent repulsion; and perhaps the very violence of his repulsion impressed the idea on him, for he found it haunting him.
W. Somerset Maugham
#88. I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.
W. Somerset Maugham
#89. I wish to deal only with the masterpieces which the consensus of opinion for a long time has accepted as supreme. We are all supposed to have read them; it is a pity that so few of us have.
W. Somerset Maugham
#90. The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.
W. Somerset Maugham
#91. The best to be said for it is that when you've come to the conclusion that something is inevitable, all you can do is to make the best of it.
W. Somerset Maugham
#92. Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.
W. Somerset Maugham
#93. I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don't.
W. Somerset Maugham
#95. He was left a good deal to himself. He had been inclined to talkativeness, but gradually he became silent. He began to think of the difference between himself and others.
W. Somerset Maugham
#96. He lit his pipe again, smiling to himself quietly, with that painful smile of his, as though he were enjoying a joke that hurt him.
W. Somerset Maugham
#98. He had been taught by his uncle that his prayers were more acceptable to God if he said them in his nightshirt than if he waited till he was dressed. This did not surprise him, for he was beginning to realize that he was the creature of a God who appreciated the discomfort of his worshipers.
W. Somerset Maugham
#99. There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish, to bewail it senseless.
W. Somerset Maugham
#100. She had learnt long ago that common sense, intelligence, good-nature, and strength of character were unimportant in comparison with a pretty face.
W. Somerset Maugham
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