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There are directors who desire to be artistic. It is pathetic to compare the seriousness of their aim with the absurdity of their attainment.
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
Desire
Attainment
Seriousness
Pathetic
Absurdity
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Aim
Artistic
Directors
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
We have long passed the Victorian Era when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.
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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.
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It is bad enough to know the past it would be intolerable to know the future.
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No egoism is so insufferable as that of the Christian with regard to his soul.
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We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house.
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I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?
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Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure.
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Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.
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Marco Polo tells the tale of The Old Man in the Mountains and how he recruits new members to his Band of Assassins by means of drugs, beautiful women, lush gardens, and religious promises. The unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.
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There is only one thing about which I am certain, and this is that there is very little about which one can be certain
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Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
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There is no need for the writer to eat a whole sheep to be able to tell you what mutton tastes like. It is enough if he eats a cutlet. But he should do that.
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The world in general doesn't know what to make of originality it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.
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and he loved her suddenly because she loved him.
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The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.
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.
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The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?
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A good rule for writers: do not explain overmuch.
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A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute.
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I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing.
W. Somerset Maugham
