Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The drama is make-believe. It does not deal with truth but with effect.
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
Make
Drama
Theater
Effects
Deal
Deals
Truth
Doe
Believe
Effect
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
The dead look so terribly dead when they're dead.
W. Somerset Maugham
There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood.
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
When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself?
W. Somerset Maugham
The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?
W. Somerset Maugham
The first duty of a woman is to be pretty, the second is to be well-groomed, and the third is never to contradict.
W. Somerset Maugham
She says it's really not very flattering to her that the women who fall in love with her husband are so uncommonly second-rate.
W. Somerset Maugham
The average American can get into the kingdom of heaven much more easily than he can get into the Boulevard St. Germain.
W. Somerset Maugham
When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch's statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
W. Somerset Maugham
It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise.
W. Somerset Maugham
I do not think you want too much sincerity in society. It would be like an iron girder in a house of cards.
W. Somerset Maugham
No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.
W. Somerset Maugham
Have common sense and stick to the point.
W. Somerset Maugham
I knew that suffering did not enoble it degraded. It made men selfish, petty and suspicious. It absorbed them in small things...it made them less than men and I wrote ferociously that we learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.
W. Somerset Maugham
The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.
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
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
She alone had been blind to his merit. Why? Because he loved her and she did not love him. What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you?
W. Somerset Maugham
There are men who are possessed by an urge so strong to do some particular thing that they can't help themselves, they've got to do it. They're prepared to sacrifice everything to satisfy their yearning.
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
