W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?

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.

A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her...but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.

When a woman loves you she's not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she's weak, she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her.

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.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.

The essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity.

The best style is the style you don't notice.

It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late. It does not improve the temper.

I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.

Impropriety is the soul of wit.

If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.

If only the good were a little less heavy-footed

Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.

Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger.

If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.

A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life.

Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.

Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.

The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.

It requires the feminine temperament to repeat the same thing three times with unabated zest.

When things are at their worst, I find something always happens.

Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure.

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.

The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes...

And I have the sunset, and the Tuscan wine, and the white teeth of the women in Rome. I am a traveler in Romance.

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.

Unconsciously, perhaps, we treasure the power we have over people by their regard for our opinion of them, and we hate those upon whom we have no such influence.

Sherry, the civilized drink.

No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.

The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.

Self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion.

When you're eighteen your emotions are violent, but they're not durable.

There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.

It was such a beautiful day I decided to stay in bed.

Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

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.

Perfection has one grave defect: it is apt to be dull.

The Riviera isn't only a sunny place for shady people.

You tend to close your eyes to truth, beauty and goodness because they give no scope to your sense of the ridiculous.

Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.

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.