A good rule for writers: do not explain overmuch. W. Somerset Maugham More Quotes by W. Somerset Maugham More Quotes From W. Somerset Maugham We have long passed the Victorian Era when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby. W. Somerset Maugham erasbabylong What mean and cruel things men can do for the love of God. W. Somerset Maugham atheismmenmean From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture. W. Somerset Maugham It was such a lovely day I thought it was a pity to get up. W. Somerset Maugham There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. W. Somerset Maugham I have an idea that 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. They are strangers at their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever knows. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest. W. Somerset Maugham It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. W. Somerset Maugham Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it. W. Somerset Maugham I do not confer praise or blame I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world. W. Somerset Maugham If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer because it was he, because it was I. W. Somerset Maugham Love is a dirty trick played on us to achieve the continuation of the species. W. Somerset Maugham The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self-complacent is erroneous -- on the contrary, it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. It is failure that makes people bitter and cruel. W. Somerset Maugham To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind. W. Somerset Maugham We write to-communicat”! W. Somerset Maugham You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches them tolerance. W. Somerset Maugham You know that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct. W. Somerset Maugham
