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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.
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
Mankind
Substantial
Fiction
Occupy
Study
Irrational
Real
Sensible
Men
Proper
Life
Significant
Shadowy
Creatures
Evidently
Figures
Coherent
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
We are not the same persons this year as last nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.
W. Somerset Maugham
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?
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
To write simply is as difficult as to be good.
W. Somerset Maugham
Refecting on the high divorce rate in America as contrasted with England American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers
W. Somerset Maugham
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
W. Somerset Maugham
Music-hall songs provide the dull with wit, just as proverbs provide them with wisdom.
W. Somerset Maugham
Success. I don't believe it has any effect on me. For one thing I always expected it.
W. Somerset Maugham
Conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation.
W. Somerset Maugham
People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.
W. Somerset Maugham
Genius is talent provided with ideals.
W. Somerset Maugham
It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule.
W. Somerset Maugham
Throw yourself into the hurly-burly of life. It doesn't matter how many mistakes you make, what unhappiness you have to undergo. It is all your material ... Don't wait for experience to come to you go out after experience. Experience is your material.
W. Somerset Maugham
I promised myself that if ever I had some money that I would savor a cigar each day after lunch and dinner. This is the only resolution of my youth that I have kept, and the only realized ambition which has not brought disillusion.
W. Somerset Maugham
A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.
W. Somerset Maugham
The world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortune, and willing avoids the sight of distress.
W. Somerset Maugham
There's no one as transparent as the person who thinks he's devilish deep.
W. Somerset Maugham
Thank God, I can look at a sunset now without having to think how to describe it
W. Somerset Maugham
The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
W. Somerset Maugham
A dictator must fool all the people all the time and there's only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.
W. Somerset Maugham
