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Age
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Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity. The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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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
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America
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The Americans who are the most efficient people on earth...have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on a...conversation without giving a moment's reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider more important matters of big business and fornication.
-W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale
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Authors & Writing
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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.
-W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up, 1938
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It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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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.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.
-W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook
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Beauty
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The ideal has many names, and beauty is but one of them.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.
-W. Somerset Maugham, Ashenden, in Cakes and Ale, ch. 11 (1930)
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Books
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No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clich?s that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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Character
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When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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Christianity
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No egoism is so insufferable as that of the Christian with regard to his soul.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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Class
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Lady Hodmarsh and the duchess immediately assumed the clinging affability that persons of rank assume with their inferiors in order to show them that they are not in the least conscious of any difference in station between them.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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Common Sense
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Common sense and nature will do a lot to make the pilgrimage of life not too difficult.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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Communication
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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.
-W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence 1919
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Consequences
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You can do anything in this world if you are prepares to take the consequences.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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Conversation
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What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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Books by and about W. Somerset Maugham