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Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.
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
Easier
Villain
Pieces
Novelists
Talking
Heroes
Good
Speaking
Things
Generally
People
Piece
Hero
Villains
Saws
Wholly
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
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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.
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There are directors who desire to be artistic. It is pathetic to compare the seriousness of their aim with the absurdity of their attainment.
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Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.
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The officers saluted as she passed and gravely bowed. They walked back across the courtyard and got into their chairs. She saw Waddington light a cigarette. A little smoke lost in the air, that was the life of a man.
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It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.
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The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.
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A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her...but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.
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There's no one as transparent as the person who thinks he's devilish deep.
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I never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull.
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You see, money to you means freedom to me it means bondage.
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It is unsafe to take your reader for more of a fool than he is.
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In civilized communities men's idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of behavior. Culture is a mask that hides their faces.
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Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.
W. Somerset Maugham
Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
W. Somerset Maugham
I can only guess that it made the world he went back to...strangely without meaning. Though he lived in it, though he even enjoyed it, it remained utterly remote. I think it had lost sense for him. In his heart was the reflection of a lovely dream that he could never quite recall.
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It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise.
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He found that it was easy to make a heroic gesture, but hard to abide by its results.
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If truth is a value it is because it is true and not because it is brave to speak it.
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Perhaps the most important use of money - It saves time. Life is so short, and there's so much to do, one can't afford to waste a minute and just think how much you waste, for instance, in walking from place to place instead of going by bus and in going by bus instead of by taxi.
W. Somerset Maugham
