W. Somerset Maugham

I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don't.

—W. Somerset Maugham

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

—W. Somerset Maugham

We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.

—W. Somerset Maugham

It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic.

—W. Somerset Maugham

Unfortunately sometimes one can't do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.

—W. Somerset Maugham

At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.

—W. Somerset Maugham

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

—W. Somerset Maugham

There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.

—W. Somerset Maugham

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

—W. Somerset Maugham

A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?

—W. Somerset Maugham

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.

—W. Somerset Maugham

The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.

—W. Somerset Maugham

I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody's else advice.

—W. Somerset Maugham