01c. 1919 ADWell, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers.W. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
02c. 1919 ADThen this must be my answer: We know that the attributes of God are infinite and it has always seemed strange to me that men have never given Him credit for common sense. It is hard to believe that He would have created so beautiful a world if He had not decided men to enjoy it. Would He have given the stars their glory, the birds their sweet song, and the flowers, their fragrance if He had not wished us to delight in them? I shave sinned before men and men have condemned me. God made me a man with passions of a man, and did He give them to me only that I should suppress them? He gave me my adventurous spirit and my love of life. I have a humble hope that when I am face to face with my Maker He will condone my imperfections and I shall find mercy in His sight.W. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
03c. 1919 ADI do not attachany exaggerated importance to my poetical works. Life isthere to be lived rather than to be written about. My aimis to search out the manifold experience that it offers,wringing from each moment what of emotion it presents.I look upon my writing as a graceful accomplishmentwhich does not absorb but rather adds pleasure toexistence. And as for posterity—damn posterity.W. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
04c. 1919 ADI'm one of the few persons I ever met who are able to learn from experience.W. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
05c. 1919 ADA writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.W. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
06c. 1919 AD...some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not.W. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
07c. 1919 ADOn the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet's history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it, so, under the influence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment.W. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
08c. 1919 ADLife is short, nature is hostile, and man is ridiculous; but oddly enough most misfortunes have their compensations, and with a certain humour and a good deal of horse-sense one can make a fairly good job of what is after all a matter of very small consequence.W. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
09c. 1919 ADHe thought to himself that there could be no greater torture in the world than at the same time to love and to contemn.W. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
10c. 1919 ADIt is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure in helping others he is benevolent; if he finds pleasure in working for society he is public-spirited; but it is for your private pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for my private pleasure that I drink another whiskey and soda. I, less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration.W. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
11c. 1919 ADIf it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.W. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
12c. 1919 ADTo eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.W. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
13c. 1919 ADThe silence was enchanting. Infinite space seemed to enter it, and my spirit, alone with the stars, seemed capable of any adventure.W. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
14c. 1919 ADThe illusion of free will is so strong in my mind that I can't get away from it, but I believe it is only an illusion. But it is an illusion which is one of the strongest motives of my actions. Before I do anything I feel that I have a choice, and that influences what I do; but afterwards, when the thing is done, I believe it was inevitable from all eternity.''What do you deduce from that?''Why merely the futility of regret. It's no good crying over spilt milk, because all the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.W. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
15c. 1919 ADLarry has been absorbed, as he wished, into that tumultuous conglomeration of humanity, distracted by so many conflicting interests, so lost in the world's confusion, so wistful of good, so cocksure on the outside, so diffident within, so kind, so hard, so trustful and so cagey, so mean and so generous, which is the people of the United States.W. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
16c. 1919 ADMost of these stories are on the tragic side. But the reader must not suppose that the incidents I have narrated were of common occurrence. The vast majority of these people, government servants, planters, and traders, who spent their working lives in Malaya were ordinary people ordinarily satisfied with their station in life. They did the jobs they were paid to do more or less competently,. They were as happy with their wives as are most married couples. They led humdrum lives and did very much the same things every day. Sometimes by way of a change they got a little shooting; but at a rule, after they had done their day's work, they played tennis if there were people to play with, went to the club at sundown if there was a club in the vicinity, drank in moderation, and played bridge. They had their little tiffs, their little jealousies, their little flirtations, their little celebrations. They were good, decent, normal people.I respect, and even admire, such people, but they are not the sort of people I can write stories about. I write stories about people who have some singularity of character which suggests to me that they may be capable of behaving in such a way as to give me an idea that I can make use of, or about people who by some accident or another, accident of temperament, accident of environment, have been involved in unusual contingencies. But, I repeat, they are the exception.W. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
17c. 1919 ADI have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.W. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
18c. 1919 AD...He had few illusions, for here are some of the things that life had taught him: "Men hate those whom they have injured; men love those whom they have benefited; men naturally avoid their benefactors; men are universally actuated by self-interest; gratitude is a lovely sense of expected benefits; promises are never forgotten by those to whom they are made, usually by those who make them.W. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
19c. 1919 AD... I was perturbed by the suspicion that the anguish of love contemned was alloyed in her broken heart with the pangs, sordid in my young mind, of wounded vanity. I had not yet learnt how contradictory is human nature; I did not know how much pose there is in the sincere. how much baseness in the noble, nor how much goodness in the reprobate.W. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
20c. 1919 ADWhen he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself?W. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
21c. 1919 ADI thought with melancholy how an author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart’s blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.W. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
23c. 1919 ADMilk is very nice, especially with a drop of brandy in it, but the domestic cow is only too glad to be rid of it. A swollen udder is very uncomfortableW. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
24c. 1919 ADIt is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded...W. Somerset Maugham / quote ↗
