Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
We do not write because we want to we write because we have to.
W. Somerset Maugham
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Write
Writing
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
Perfection has one grave defect: it is apt to be dull.
W. Somerset Maugham
She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer made her confident way towards the white cliffs of the obvious.
W. Somerset Maugham
The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
W. Somerset Maugham
By the time a man notices that he is no longer young, his youth has long since left him.
W. Somerset Maugham
You cannot write well or much (and I venture the opinion that you cannot write well unless you write much) unless you form a habit.
W. Somerset Maugham
Women are strange little beasts,' he said to Dr. Coutras. 'You can treat them like dogs, you can beat them till your arm aches, and still they love you.' He shrugged his shoulders. 'Of course, it is one of the most absurd illusions of Christianity that they have souls.
W. Somerset Maugham
He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.
W. Somerset Maugham
The most valuable thing I have learned from life is to regret nothing.
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
The passing moment is all we can be sure of it is only common sense to extract its utmost value from it.
W. Somerset Maugham
But I am not sure it would contain any short stories. For the short story is a minor art, and it must content itself with moving, exciting and amusing the reader. ...I do not think that there is any (short story) that will give the reader that thrill, that rapture, that fruitful energy which great art can produce.
W. Somerset Maugham
There's no one as transparent as the person who thinks he's devilish deep.
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
What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.
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
Yet magic is no more than the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the seen is the measure of the unseen.
W. Somerset Maugham
The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?
W. Somerset Maugham
It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled in them, and each time they come into contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded.
W. Somerset Maugham
Beauty is an ecstasy it is as simple as hunger.
W. Somerset Maugham
No egoism is so insufferable as that of the Christian with regard to his soul.
W. Somerset Maugham
