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There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W. Somerset Maugham
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W. Somerset Maugham
Age: 90 †
Born: 1874
Born: January 1
Died: 1965
Died: January 1
Army Scout
Literary Critic
Novelist
Physician Writer
Playwright
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Paris
France
W. Somerset Maugham
Somerset Maugham
Writing
Unfortunately
Rules
Novel
Three
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.
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Imagination grows by exercise.
W. Somerset Maugham
She’s wonderful. Tell her I’ve never seen such beautiful hands. I wonder what she sees in you.” Waddington, smiling, translated the question. “She says I’m good.” “As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue,” Kitty mocked.
W. Somerset Maugham
In religion above all things the only thing of use is an objective truth. The only God that is of use is a being who is personal, supreme and good, and whose existence is as certain as that two and two make four.
W. Somerset Maugham
D'you call life a bad job? Never! We've had our ups and downs, we've had our struggles, we've always been poor, but it's been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I say when I look round at my children.
W. Somerset Maugham
Now it is a funny thing about life. If you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. If you utterly decline to make do with what you can get, then somehow or other, you are very likely to get what you want.
W. Somerset Maugham
At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
W. Somerset Maugham
Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.
W. Somerset Maugham
The day broke grey and dull. The clouds hung heavily, and there was a rawness in the air that suggested snow. A woman servant came into a room in which a child was sleeping and drew the curtains. She glanced mechanically at the house opposite, a stucco house with a portico, and went to the child's bed.
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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
I wonder how anyone can have the face to condemn others when he reflects upon his own thoughts.
W. Somerset Maugham
But what is criticism? Criticism is purely destructive anyone can destroy, but not everyone can build up.
W. Somerset Maugham
From old habit, unconsciously he thanked God that he no longer believed in Him.
W. Somerset Maugham
The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
W. Somerset Maugham
Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.
W. Somerset Maugham
The audience is a very curious animal. It is shrewd rather than intelligent. Its mental capacity is less than that of its most intellectual members.
W. Somerset Maugham
I'd sooner be smashed into a mangled pulp by a bus when we cross the street than look forward to a life like yours.
W. Somerset Maugham
People talk of beauty lightly, and having no feeling for words, they use that one carelessly, so that it loses its force and the thing it stands for, sharing its name with a hundred trivial objects, is deprived of dignity. They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognise it.
W. Somerset Maugham
The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.
W. Somerset Maugham
I don't know why it is that the religious never ascribe common sense to God.
W. Somerset Maugham
