If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAMWhen you’re eighteen your emotions are violent, but they’re not durable.
More W. Somerset Maugham Quotes
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A dictator must fool all the people all the time and there’s only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.
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The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?
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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.
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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.
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What does democracy come down to? The persuasive power of slogans invented by wily self-seeking politicians.
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An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.
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Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly?
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Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.
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They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon; and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognise it.
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Now the answer … is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for life and life has no meaning.
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Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.
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We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them.
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I wish I could make you see how much fuller the life I offer you is than anything you have a conception of.
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When I look back upon the girl I was I hate myself. But I never had a chance. I’m going to bring up my daughter so that she’s free and can stand on her own feet.
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The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
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The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
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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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You learn more quickly under the guidance of experienced teachers.
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Life wouldn’t be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.
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Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger.
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If a man hasn’t what’s necessary to make a woman love him, it’s his fault, not hers.
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In France you get freedom of action: you can do what you like and nobody bothers, but you must think like everybody else. In Germany you must do what everybody else does, but you may think as you choose. They’re both very good things.
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There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one’s means of livelihood.
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Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.
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If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
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When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM