W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

A good story is obviously a difficult thing to invent, but its difficulty is a poor reason for despising it.

W. Somerset Maugham

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• I consider music to be storytelling, melody and rhythm. A lot of hip-hop has broken music down. There are no instruments and no songwriting. So you're left with just storytelling and rhythm. And the storytelling can be so braggadocious, you're just left with rhythm.

  

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• I began teaching in New York because I needed to stay in the United States and didn't have my immigration papers in order, so working for a university was a way of resolving the issue.

  

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• I'm the diva from the future. The next gig's on the moon. Catch me while you can.

  

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• It seemed like most of the memories faded before they had time to form. And after a while, my life with my father seemed like a familiar story or a distant dream.

  

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• The two sensibilities, the visual and the verbal, have always been linked for me - in fact, while reading a particularly evocative passage, I will imagine what the photograph I'd take of that scene would look like, even with burning and dodging notes. Maybe everyone does this.

  

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• The voters in District 8 shared our vision that Washington is broken, and we're going to go up there and fix it.

  

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• Actors go inside the heads of other people and are not afraid of the complicated places you can find yourself.

  

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• I can't wait to meet Jennifer Hudson, Tamyra Gray, George Huff, Ruben Studdard, and I love me some Clay Aiken.

  

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• We think that democracy can change a lot of things, but we're being fooled, because democracy is not the election. We've been taught that democracy is having elections. And it isn't. Elections are the most horrendous aspect of democracy. It's the most mundane, trivial, disappointing, dirty aspect.

  

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• There is no bigger aphrodisiac than power.

  

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• There are competing studies on how much crime drops or doesn't drop when there are strict rules on gun possession and sale. I don't think there's any question that New York City's very tough laws have reduced violence.

  

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• Why are numbers so important? I take up a film I like, give it my best, and move on.

  

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• No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it's probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.

  

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• When they see those fourteen lights, they're looking at a miracle. And deep down, they feel that whatever's going to happen, there will be someone there to help them. And that fills them with hope.

  

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• My comedy isn't going to solve problems; I'm not that deep.

  

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• True humility is intelligent self respect which keeps us from thinking too highly or too meanly of ourselves. It makes us modest by reminding us how far we have come short of what we can be.

  

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• I usually start writing a novel that I then abandon. When I say abandon, I don't think any writer ever abandons anything that they regard as even a half-good sentence. So you recycle. I mean, I can hang on to a sentence for several years and then put it into a book that's completely different from the one it started in.

  

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• The figures... are not supposed to reveal anything... It's like seeing a stranger in some place like an air terminal for the first time. You look at him, you notice his shoes, his suit, the pin in his lapel, but you don't have any particular feeling about him.

  

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• It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.

  

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• Most importantly, nothing has happened to change my conviction that freedom and the love of liberty remain the essential defining attributes of our national character as a people.

  

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• I can't know entirely what's at stake beforehand; you find out as you go. I love to take a poem, for instance, that starts with something seemingly frivolous or inconsequential and then grows in gravity until by the end it's something very serious.

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• A good story is obviously a difficult thing to invent, but its difficulty is a poor reason for despising it.

  

  W. Somerset Maugham
  • Good