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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
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Critic
May
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Book
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More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
Life isn't long enough for love and art.
W. Somerset Maugham
Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.
W. Somerset Maugham
First, cut out all the wisdom, then cut out all the adjectives.
W. Somerset Maugham
The Almighty can hardly be such a fool as the churches make out.
W. Somerset Maugham
The well dressed man is he whose clothes you never notice
W. Somerset Maugham
We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.
W. Somerset Maugham
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.
W. Somerset Maugham
Evil is a necessary part of the order of the universe.
W. Somerset Maugham
Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.
W. Somerset Maugham
There was an immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead: they did not seem to belong to the same species and it was strange to think that but a little while before they had spoken and moved and eaten and laughed.
W. Somerset Maugham
Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.
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
Sentimentality is the only sentiment that rubs you the wrong way.
W. Somerset Maugham
No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.
W. Somerset Maugham
Are you sure you can prevent yourself from falling in love one of these days? Such things do happen, you know, even to the most prudent men.' Simon gave him a strange, one might even have thought a hostile, look. I should tear it out of my heart as I'd wrench out of my mouth a rotten tooth.
W. Somerset Maugham
It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me.
W. Somerset Maugham
There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China. Solitarily, with the indifference of nature herself, it crept up the mountain side and slipped down to the depth of the valley.
W. Somerset Maugham
She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.
W. Somerset Maugham
The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
W. Somerset Maugham
Considering how foolishly people act and how pleasantly they prattle, perhaps it would be better for the world if they talked more and did less.
W. Somerset Maugham
