W. Somerset Maugham
I wonder how anyone can have the face to condemn others when he reflects upon his own thoughts.Collection: Faces
A novelist must preserve a childlike belief in the importance of things which common sense considers of no great consequence.Collection: Common Sense
There is no object to life. To nature nothing matters but the continuation of the species.Collection: Matter
There is only one thing about which I am certain, and this is that there is very little about which one can be certainCollection: Decision
We do not write as we want, but as we can.Collection: Inspirational
Reserve is an artificial quality that is developed in most of us but as the result of innumerable rebuffs.Collection: Character
It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me.Collection: Faults
In civilized communities men's idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of behavior. Culture is a mask that hides their faces.Collection: Men
Remember that it is nothing to do your duty, that is demanded of you and is no more meritorious than to wash your hands when they are dirty; the only thing that counts is the love of duty; when love and duty are one, then grace is in you and you will enjoy a happiness which passes all understanding.Collection: Dirty
You see, money to you means freedom; to me it means bondage.Collection: Mean
For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay.Collection: Sports
I don't understand anything. Life is so strange. I feel like some one who's lived all his life by a duck-pond and suddenly is shown the sea. It makes me a little breathless, and yet it fills me with elation. I don't want to die, I want to live. I'm beginning to feel a new courage. I feel like one of those old sailors who set sail for undiscovered seas and I think my soul hankers for the unknown.Collection: Thinking
To write simply is as difficult as to be good.Collection: Writing
Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers.Collection: People
You cannot write well or much (and I venture the opinion that you cannot write well unless you write much) unless you form a habit.Collection: Writing
Comedy appeals to the collective mind of the audience and this grows fatigued; while farce appeals to a more robust organ, their collective belly.Collection: Mind
Yet magic is no more than the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses; and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the seen is the measure of the unseen.Collection: Art
[Money] is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.Collection: Destiny
What mean and cruel things men can do for the love of God.Collection: Mean
No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés 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.Collection: Writing
There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China. Solitarily, with the indifference of nature herself, it crept up the mountain side and slipped down to the depth of the valley.Collection: Wall
It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.Collection: Philosophy
If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn't be as overpopulated as it is now.Collection: Wisdom
By the time a man notices that he is no longer young, his youth has long since left him.Collection: Love
Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.Collection: Beauty
When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.Collection: Love
A good rule for writers: do not explain overmuch.Collection: Writing
But what is criticism? Criticism is purely destructive; anyone can destroy, but not everyone can build up.Collection: Criticism
Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives not by truth but by make-believe.Collection: Life
You Europeans know nothing about America. Because we amass large fortunes you think we care for nothing but money. We are nothing for it; the moment we have it we spend it, sometimes well, sometimes ill, but we spend it. Money is nothing to us; it's merely the symbol of success. We are the greatest idealists in the world; I happen to think that we've set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.Collection: Men
The great trues are too important to be new.Collection: Important
As we grow older we become more conscious of the complexity, incoherence, and unreasonableness of human beings; this indeed is the only excuse that offers for the middle-aged or elderly writer whose thoughts should more properly be turned to graver matters, occupying himself with the trivial concerns of imaginary people.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Love
I'm only twenty-five. If I've made a mistake I have time to correct it.Collection: Mistake
The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.Collection: Funny
The best style is the style you don't notice.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Pain
I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody's else advice.Collection: Mistake
Its a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called, few are chosen.Collection: Track
I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos.Collection: Men
I do not believe they are right who say that the defects of famous men should be ignored. I think it is better that we should know them. Then, though we are conscious of having faults as glaring as theirs, we can believe that that is no hindrance to our achieving also something of their virtues.Collection: Inspirational
Art, if it is to be reckoned as one of the great values of life, must teach man humility, tolerance, wisdom and magnanimity. The value of art is not beauty, but right action.Collection: Art
No man in his heart is quite so cynical as a well-bred woman.Collection: Heart
It is astonishing how many books I find there is no need for me to read at all.Collection: Book
Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.Collection: Life
Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.Collection: Men
Throw yourself into the hurly-burly of life. It doesn't matter how many mistakes you make, what unhappiness you have to undergo. It is all your material ... Don't wait for experience to come to you; go out after experience. Experience is your material.Collection: Mistake
The well dressed man is he whose clothes you never noticeCollection: Men
To bear failure with courage is the best proof of character that anyone can give.Collection: Courage