W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.
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You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.
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... the Eternal turned his attention to the three shades who stood humbly and yet hopefully before him. The quick, with so short a time to live, when they talk of themselves, talk too much; but the dead, with eternity before them, are so verbose that only angels could listen to them with civility.
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Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.
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He had doubts about the utility of examination on subjects which had been crammed for the occasion. He wanted common sense.
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She could not admit but that he had remarkable qualities, sometimes she thought that there was even in him a strange and unattractive greatness; it was curious then that she could not love him, but loved still a man whose worthlessness was now so clear to her.
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He made one laugh sometimes by speaking the truth, but this is a form of humour which gains its force only by its unusualness; it would cease to amuse if it were commonly practised.
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Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.
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I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.
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…the future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.
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An art is only great and significant if it is one that all may enjoy. The art of a clique is but a plaything.
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Art... is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.
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Tahiti is very far away, and I knew that I should never see it again. A chapter of my life was closed, and I felt a little nearer to inevitable death.
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I thought I should be a fool to allow work to interfere with a delight in the passing moment that I might never enjoy again so fully.
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An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.
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Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.
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I do not believe they are right who say that the defects of famous men should be ignored. I think it is better that we should know them. Then, though we are conscious of having faults as glaring as theirs, we can believe that that is no hindrance to our achieving also something of their virtues.
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The life force is vigorous. The delight that accompanies it counter-balances all the pains and hardships that confront men. It makes life worth living.
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There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.
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I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody's else advice.
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You 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.
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It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and, for all that, yield a plausible harmony.
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The great man is too often all of a piece; it is the little man that is a bundle of contradictory elements. He is inexhaustible. You never come to the end of the surprises he has in store for you.
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There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China. Solitarily, with the indifference of nature herself, it crept up the mountain side and slipped down to the depth of the valley.