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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
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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
Thinking
Emotions
Novel
Emotion
Moral
Arouse
Sense
Stimulate
Doe
Entertain
May
Satisfy
Think
Aesthetic
More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humour.
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
No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.
W. Somerset Maugham
My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.
W. Somerset Maugham
When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right.
W. Somerset Maugham
Our natural egoism leads us to judge people by their relations to ourselves. We want them to be certain things to us, and for us that is what they are because the rest of them is no good to us, we ignore it.
W. Somerset Maugham
The mathematician who after seeing Phedre asked: 'Qu'est que ca prouve?' was not such a fool as he has been generally made out. No one has ever been able to explain why the Doric temple of Paestum is more beautiful than a glass of cold beer except by bringing in considerations that have nothing to do with beauty.
W. Somerset Maugham
We find things beautiful because we recognize them and contrariwise we find things beautiful because their novelty surprises us.
W. Somerset Maugham
It does the heart good to look at you.
W. Somerset Maugham
The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.
W. Somerset Maugham
Imagination grows by exercise.
W. Somerset Maugham
She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer made her confident way towards the white cliffs of the obvious.
W. Somerset Maugham
Perhaps it would have been possible to see in him a new Prometheus...the hero who for the good of mankind exposes himself to the agonies of the damned...undaunted by failure, by an unceasing effort of courage holding despair at bay, doggedly persistent in the face of self-doubt, which is the artist's bitterest enemy.
W. Somerset Maugham
Art, unless it leads to right action, is no more than the opium of an intelligentsia.
W. Somerset Maugham
It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.
W. Somerset Maugham
The great trues are too important to be new.
W. Somerset Maugham
It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.
W. Somerset Maugham
By the time a man notices that he is no longer young, his youth has long since left him.
W. Somerset Maugham
The Riviera isn't only a sunny place for shady people.
W. Somerset Maugham
Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose.
W. Somerset Maugham
