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The worst of having so much tact was that you never quite knew whether other people were acting naturally or being tactful too. [The human element]
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
Never
Worst
People
Knew
Quite
Acting
Tactful
Whether
Tact
Human
Element
Humans
Naturally
Much
Elements
More quotes by 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.
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Tolerance is only another name for indifference.
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Why did you look at the sunset?' Philip answered with his mouth full: Because I was happy.
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Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
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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.
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Comedy appeals to the collective mind of the audience and this grows fatigued while farce appeals to a more robust organ, their collective belly.
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Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature and the error is ineradicable.
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Make him laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured.
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What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you?
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When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.
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The moral I draw is that the writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from the burden of thought and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success.
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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.
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But what is criticism? Criticism is purely destructive anyone can destroy, but not everyone can build up.
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As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.
W. Somerset Maugham
A good rule for writers: do not explain overmuch.
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There are times when I look over the various parts of my character with perplexity. I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?
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For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.
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If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.
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Clearly much that seemed valid seemed so only because he had been taught it from earliest youth.
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I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me.
W. Somerset Maugham
