Somerset Maugham
William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874. He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style.
His parents died early and, after an unhappy boyhood, which he recorded poignantly in Of Human Bondage, Maugham became a qualified physician. But writing was his true vocation. For ten years before his first success, he almost literally starved while pouring out novels and plays.
Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as 'such a tissue of clichés' that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way.
During World War I, Maugham worked for the British Secret Service . He travelled all over the world, and made many visits to America. After World War II, Maugham made his home in south of France and continued to move between England and Nice till his death in 1965.
“Great writers create; writers of smaller gifts copy”
“...it is well known that to praise someone whose rivalry you do not dread is often a very good way of putting a spoke in the wheel of someone whose rivalry you do.”
“Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.”
“Chi non riesce in nessun altra cosa di solito si mette a scrivere.”
“Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.”
“Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.”
“Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.”
“You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action.”
“I have noticed that when someone asks for you on the telephone and, finding you out, leaves a message begging you to call him up the moment you come in, as it's important, the matter is often more important to him than to you.”
“It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me.”
“The unfortunate thing about this world is that good habits are so much easier to give up than bad ones.”
“There are times when I look over the various parts of my character with perplexity. I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?”
“The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.”