William 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.
“Quizá cuando su vida acabe no deje de su paso por la tierra señales más profundas que las que un canto arrojado al río deja sobre la superficie del agua.”
“when feeling is the gauge, you can snap your fingers at logic”
“Skoonheid is iets wonderliks en vreemds wat die kunstenaar al worstelend uit die chaos van die wereld haal.”
“And then he felt the misery of his life.”
“She gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she put into her answer. "You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!”
“Dying is a dull, dreary affair. my advice is that you have nothing whatever to with it.”
“The best style is the style you don't notice.”
“If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?”
“One cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one's soul.”
“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.”
“It is unsafe to take your reader for more of a fool than he is.”
“Self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion...”
“You know, of course, that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.”
“But if the folly of men made one angry one would pass one's life in a state of chronic ire.”
“So now what?''Well, if you insist on marrying me... But it's an awful risk we're taking!''Darling, that's what life's for - to take risks.”
“One of the falsest of proverbs is that you must lie on the bed that you have made. The experience of life shows that people are constantly doing things which must lead to disaster, and yet by come chance manage to evade the result of their folly.”
“You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action. In France you get freedom of action: you can do what you like and nobody bothers, but you must think like everybody else. In Germany you must do what everybody else does, but you may think as you choose. They're both very good things. I personally prefer freedom of thought. But in England you get neither: you're ground down by convention. You can't think as you like and you can't act as you like. That's because it's a democratic nation. I expect America's worse.”
“if you'd ever had a grown-up daughter you'd know that by comparison a bucking steer is easy to manage. And as to knowing what goes on inside her - well, it's much better to pretend you're the simple, innocent old fool she almost certainly takes you for.”
“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.”