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The world in general doesn't know what to make of originality it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.
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
Thought
Habits
Firsts
Reactions
Anger
First
General
Make
Habit
World
Comfortable
Startled
Doesn
Originality
Political
Reaction
More quotes by 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
We do not write as we want, but as we can.
W. Somerset Maugham
A man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn't want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing.
W. Somerset Maugham
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.
W. Somerset Maugham
I have always been convinced that if a woman once made up her mind to marry a man, nothing but instant flight could save him.
W. Somerset Maugham
I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?
W. Somerset Maugham
Illusions are like umbrellas - you no sooner get them than you lose them, and the loss always leaves a little painful wound.
W. Somerset Maugham
It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humour.
W. Somerset Maugham
Never pause unless you have a reason for it, but when you pause, pause as long as you can.
W. Somerset Maugham
To bear failure with courage is the best proof of character that anyone can give.
W. Somerset Maugham
I [Death] was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.
W. Somerset Maugham
Our natural egoism leads us to judge people by their relations to ourselves. We want them to be certain things to us, and for us that is what they are because the rest of them is no good to us, we ignore it.
W. Somerset Maugham
No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess.
W. Somerset Maugham
Because a man can write great works he is none the less a man.
W. Somerset Maugham
A man filled with meat turns his back on the dry bones of political doctrine. Fanatical devotion to the ruling party comes more readily from the materially deprived At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
W. Somerset Maugham
The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself.
W. Somerset Maugham
Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.
W. Somerset Maugham
Art should be appreciated with passion and violence, not with a tepid, depreciating elegance that fears the censoriousness of a common room.
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
If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.
W. Somerset Maugham
