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Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
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
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Conformity
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More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
The value of money is that with it we can tell any man to go to the devil. It is the sixth sense which enables you to enjoy the other five.
W. Somerset Maugham
As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue.
W. Somerset Maugham
The average American can get into the kingdom of heaven much more easily than he can get into the Boulevard St. Germain.
W. Somerset Maugham
Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.
W. Somerset Maugham
A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.
W. Somerset Maugham
The ideas for stories that thronged my brain would not let me rest till I had got rid of them by writing them.
W. Somerset Maugham
I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.
W. Somerset Maugham
The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.
W. Somerset Maugham
Make him laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured.
W. Somerset Maugham
Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. It's a funny thing about life if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
W. Somerset Maugham
Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.
W. Somerset Maugham
It takes two to make a love affair and a mans meat is too often a woman's poison.
W. Somerset Maugham
Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.
W. Somerset Maugham
Only a mediocre person is always at his best.
W. Somerset Maugham
Some American delusions: 1) That there is no class-consciousness in the country. 2) That American coffee is good. 3) That Americans are business-like. 4) That Americans are highly-sexed and that redheads are more highly sexed than others.
W. Somerset Maugham
We learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.
W. Somerset Maugham
Heaven knows what pains the author has been at, what bitter experience he has endured and what heartache suffered, to give some chance reader a few hours' relaxation or to while away the tedium of a journey.
W. Somerset Maugham
The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.
W. Somerset Maugham
Thank God, I can look at a sunset now without having to think how to describe it
W. Somerset Maugham
A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country.
W. Somerset Maugham
