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Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered.
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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Generation
Perform
Power
Build
Powers
May
Resources
Remembered
Great
Generations
Forth
Something
Land
Interests
Call
Develop
Interest
Worthy
Whether
Institutions
Promote
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
The novel may stimulate you to think. It may satisfy your aesthetic sense. It may arouse your moral emotions. But if it does not entertain you it is a bad novel.
W. Somerset Maugham
A good rule for writers: do not explain overmuch.
W. Somerset Maugham
The inclination to digress is human. But the dramatist must avoid it even more strenuously than the saint must avoid sin, for while sin may be venial, digression is mortal.
W. Somerset Maugham
He knew that all things human are transitory and therefore that it must cease one day or another. He looked forward to that day with eager longing. Love was like a parasite in his heart, nourishing a hateful existence on his life's blood it absorbed his existence so intensely that he could take pleasure in nothing else.
W. Somerset Maugham
Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagination it is the privilege of the artist that with him it is not as with other men an escape from reality, but the means by which he accedes to it.
W. Somerset Maugham
Perfection has one grave defect: it is apt to be dull.
W. Somerset Maugham
We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.
W. Somerset Maugham
Just as the painter thinks with his brush and paints the novelist thinks with his story.
W. Somerset Maugham
No action is in itself good or bad, but only such according to convention.
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
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
When things are at their worst, I find something always happens.
W. Somerset Maugham
Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.
W. Somerset Maugham
There is only one way to win hearts and that is to make oneself like unto those of whom one would be loved.
W. Somerset Maugham
Life isn't long enough for love and art.
W. Somerset Maugham
A woman will always sacrifice herself if you give her the opportunity. It is her favourite form of self indulgence.
W. Somerset Maugham
The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so.
W. Somerset Maugham
All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.
W. Somerset Maugham
Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.
W. Somerset Maugham
When she liked anyone it was quite natural for her to go to bed with him. She never thought twice about it. It was not vice it wasn't lasciviousness it was her nature. She gave herself as naturally as the sun gives heat or the flowers their perfume. It was a pleasure to her and she liked to give pleasure to others.
W. Somerset Maugham
