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A novelist must preserve a childlike belief in the importance of things which common sense considers of no great consequence.
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
Sense
Novelist
Must
Preserve
Great
Preserves
Things
Novelists
Consequence
Importance
Belief
Considers
Common
Childlike
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
People who ask for your criticism want only praise.
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You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance.
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A woman will always sacrifice herself if you give her the opportunity. It is her favourite form of self indulgence.
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The artist produces for the liberation of his soul.
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Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.
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When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right.
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I am afraid of people with too much charm. They devour you. In the end you are made a sacrifice to the exercise of their fascinating gift and their insincerity.
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Yet magic is no more than the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the seen is the measure of the unseen.
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The mystic sees the ineffable, and the psychopathologist the unspeakable.
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Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.
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It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.
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It is astonishing how many books I find there is no need for me to read at all.
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Impropriety is the soul of wit.
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I don't know why it is that the religious never ascribe common sense to God.
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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.
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What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.
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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.
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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.
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The drama is make-believe. It does not deal with truth but with effect.
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It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. - Of Human Bondage
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