W. 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.
“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.”
“Its a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called, few are chosen.”
“Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.”
“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...”
“The moral I draw is that the writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from the burden of thought; and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success.”
“It’s a very funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.”
“There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.”
“Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.”
“She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.”
“I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the center of the world.”
“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
“In business sharp practice sometimes succeeds, but in art honesty is not only the best but the only policy.”
“Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose.”
“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.”
“To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.”
“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
“People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.”
“Cronshaw stopped for a moment to drink. He had pondered for twenty years the problem whether he loved liquor because it made him talk or whether he loved conversation because it made him thirsty.”
“The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.”