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The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.
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
Thing
Meaning
Education
Reading
Book
Important
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
It is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated.
W. Somerset Maugham
The nature of men and women - their essential nature - is so vile and despicable that if you were to portray a person as he really is, no one would believe you.
W. Somerset Maugham
Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequence than to have a really affectionate mother.
W. Somerset Maugham
She loved three things — a joke, a glass of wine, and a handsome man.
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The normal is what you find but rarely. The normal is an ideal. It is a picture that one fabricates of the average characteristics of men, and to find them all in a single man is hardly to be expected.
W. Somerset Maugham
Women's hearts are like old china, none the worse for a break or two.
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
In religion above all things the only thing of use is an objective truth. The only God that is of use is a being who is personal, supreme and good, and whose existence is as certain as that two and two make four.
W. Somerset Maugham
Has it occurred to you that transmigration is at once an explanation and a justification of the evil of the world? If the evils we suffer are the result of sins committed in our past lives, we can bear them with resignation and hope that if in this one we strive toward virtue out future lives will be less afflicted.
W. Somerset Maugham
As we grow older we become more conscious of the complexity, incoherence, and unreasonableness of human beings this indeed is the only excuse that offers for the middle-aged or elderly writer whose thoughts should more properly be turned to graver matters, occupying himself with the trivial concerns of imaginary people.
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
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
Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.
W. Somerset Maugham
Great writers create writers of smaller gifts copy
W. Somerset Maugham
You will have to learn many tedious things,...which you will forget the moment you have passed your final examination, but in anatomy it is better to have learned and lost than never to have learned at all.
W. Somerset Maugham
We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.
W. Somerset Maugham
My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.
W. Somerset Maugham
First, cut out all the wisdom, then cut out all the adjectives.
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
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
