Quotes By W. Somerset Maugham

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.

The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.

I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me.

Have common sense and stick to the point.

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time.

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.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

The crown of literature is poetry.

A man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn't want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing.

Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.

Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequence than to have a really affectionate mother.

It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.

Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.

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.

We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.

The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.

It wasn't until late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say "I don't know."

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

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.

Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.

Any nation that thinks more of its ease and comfort than its freedom will soon lose its freedom; and the ironical thing about it is that it will lose its ease and comfort too.