793 Quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right.

Refecting on the high divorce rate in America as contrasted with England "American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers

Just as the painter thinks with his brush and paints the novelist thinks with his story.

Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. 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.

A man filled with meat turns his back on the dry bones of political doctrine. Fanatical devotion to the ruling party comes more readily from the materially deprived At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.

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

The worst of having so much tact was that you never quite knew whether other people were acting naturally or being tactful too. [The human element]

The audience is a very curious animal. It is shrewd rather than intelligent. Its mental capacity is less than that of its most intellectual members.

But what is criticism? Criticism is purely destructive; anyone can destroy, but not everyone can build up.