W. Somerset Maugham

When I was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask me to stay with him in the country. He was a religious man and he read prayers to the assembled household every morning. But he had crossed out in pencil all the passages that praised God. He said that there was nothing so vulgar as to praise people to their faces and, himself a gentleman, he could not believe that God was so ungentlemanly as to like it.

It is funny about life: if you refuse to accept anything but the very best you will very often get it.

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches them tolerance.

There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

There will always be one who loves, and one who lets himself be loved.

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.

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers at their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever knows.

Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.