William Somerset Maugham Quotes

He had doubts about the utility of examination on subjects which had been crammed for the occasion. He wanted common sense.

Observing these people I am no longer surprised that there is such a scarcity of domestic servants back home.

Said in 1921. Quoted in The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990), p. 75

I hate people who play bridge as though they were at a funeral and knew their feet were getting wet.

A soul is a troublesome possession, and when man developed it he lost the Garden of Eden.

Money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.

To eat well in England, you should have a breakfast three times a day.

Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.

What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.

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.

Money is like a sixth sense - and you can't make use of the other five without it.

It is unsafe to take your reader for more of a fool than he is.

The trouble with our younger authors is that they are all in the sixties.

Now the world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.

He knew that women appreciated neither irony nor sarcasm, but simple jokes and funny stories. He was amply provided with both.