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But the only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you it may have other and much more profound meanings for the critic, but at second-hand they can be of small service to 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
Much
Second
Hand
Small
Meanings
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Critic
May
Critics
Book
Profound
Important
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Meaning
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.
W. Somerset Maugham
Failure make people bitter and cruel. Success improves the character of the man.
W. Somerset Maugham
If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one.
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
What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?
W. Somerset Maugham
When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character.
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
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
I don't know why it is that the religious never ascribe common sense to God.
W. Somerset Maugham
No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.
W. Somerset Maugham
An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.
W. Somerset Maugham
A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country.
W. Somerset Maugham
Thank God, I can look at a sunset now without having to think how to describe it
W. Somerset Maugham
It is good to be on your guard against an Englishman who speaks French perfectly he is very likely to be a card-sharper or an attache in the diplomatic service.
W. Somerset Maugham
No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess.
W. Somerset Maugham
I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.
W. Somerset Maugham
She could not admit but that he had remarkable qualities, sometimes she thought that there was even in him a strange and unattractive greatness it was curious then that she could not love him, but loved still a man whose worthlessness was now so clear to her.
W. Somerset Maugham
Sentimentality is the only sentiment that rubs you the wrong way.
W. Somerset Maugham
She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.
W. Somerset Maugham
The Riviera isn't only a sunny place for shady people.
W. Somerset Maugham
