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Advice to first year medical students: In anatomy, it is better to have learned and lost than never to have learned at all.
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
Year
Lost
Better
Firsts
Anatomy
First
Medical
Years
Advice
Never
Students
Learned
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Clearly much that seemed valid seemed so only because he had been taught it from earliest youth.
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The great trues are too important to be new.
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The audience is a very curious animal. It is shrewd rather than intelligent. Its mental capacity is less than that of its most intellectual members.
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A good rule for writers: do not explain overmuch.
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Simplicity and naturalness are the truest marks of distinction.
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You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.
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All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.
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Some American delusions: 1) That there is no class-consciousness in the country. 2) That American coffee is good. 3) That Americans are business-like. 4) That Americans are highly-sexed and that redheads are more highly sexed than others.
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Heaven knows what pains the author has been at, what bitter experience he has endured and what heartache suffered, to give some chance reader a few hours' relaxation or to while away the tedium of a journey.
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Dying is the most hellishly boresome experience in the world! Particularly when it entails dying of 'natural causes'.
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You learn more quickly under the guidance of experienced teachers. You waste a lot of time going down blind alleys if you have no one to lead you.
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For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.
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I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the center of the world.
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When things are at their worst, I find something always happens.
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The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind.
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Writing is the supreme solace.
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The normal is what you find but rarely. The normal is an ideal. It is a picture that one fabricates of the average characteristics of men, and to find them all in a single man is hardly to be expected.
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The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.
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There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
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