"You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent."

"There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood...Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five."

"People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise."

"Men seek but one thing in life — their pleasure."

"I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world."

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

"Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind."

"It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded."

"You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The isn't only a sunny place for shady people."

"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too."

"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!""

"The tragedy of love is indifference."

"Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure."

"My heart always warms to people who do not come to see me, especially Americans, to whom it seems to be more of an effort."

"I rather doubt if man really has much to gain by substituting peace for strife, as you and Jesus Christ recommend. Sic notus Ulixes? do you think you can outwit the resourceful malevolence of Nature? God is not mocked, as St. Paul long ago warned the Galatians. When man gets rid of a great trouble he is easier for a while, but not for long: Nature instantly sets to work to weaken his power of sustaining trouble, and very soon seven pounds is as heavy as fourteen pounds used to be. Last Easter Monday a young woman threw herself in the Lea because her dress looked so shabby amongst the holiday crowd: in other times and countries women have been ravished by half-a-dozen dragoons and taken it less to heart. It looks to me as if the state of mankind always had been and always would be a state of just tolerable discomfort."

"Three minutes' thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time."

"The average man, if he meddles with criticism at all, is a conservative critic. His opinions are determined not by his reason -- 'the bulk of mankind' says Swift 'is as well qualified for flying as for thinking' -- but by his passions; and the faintest of all human passions is the love of truth. He believes that the text of ancient authors is generally sound, not because he has acquainted himself with the elements of the problem, but because he would feel uncomfortable if he did not believe it; just as he believes, on the same cogent evidence, that he is a fine fellow, and that he will rise again from the dead."

"The house of delusions is cheap to build, but draughty to live in, and ready at any instant to fall."

"Chorus: O suitably attired in leather boots Head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom Whence by what way how purposed art thou come To this well-nightingaled vicinity? My object in inquiring is to know. But if you happen to be deaf and dumb And do not understand a word I say, Nod with your hand to signify as much. Alcmaeon: I journeyed hither a Boeotian road. Chorus: Sailing on horseback or with feet for oars? Alcmaeon: Plying by turns my partnership of legs. Chorus: Beneath a shining or a rainy Zeus? Alcmaeon: Mud's sister, not himself, adorns my shoes. Chorus: To learn your name would not displease me much. Alcmaeon: Not all that men desire do they attain."

"The most important truth which has ever been uttered, and the greatest discovery ever made in the moral world."

"W. Somerset Maugham, Collected Short Stories, I (Penguin Books, 1977)"

"Sri Bhagavan went into the room, took a seat and gazed on Mr. Maugham. He regained his senses and saluted Sri Bhagavan. They remained silent and sat facing each other for nearly an hour. The author [Maugham] attempted to ask questions but did not speak. Maj. Chadwick encouraged him to ask. Sri Bhagavan said, “All finished. Heart-talk is all talk. All talk must end in silence only.” They smiled and Sri Bhagavan left the room.’"

"Then there was Somerset Maugham, a grim figure; rat-eyed; dead man cheeked, unshaven; a criminal I should have said had I met him on a bus."

"He couldn't write for toffee, bless his heart. He wrote conventional short stories, much inferior to the work of other people. But they were much better than his plays, which were too frightful. He was an extremely interesting man though, not a bit clever or cold or cynical. I know of many affectionate things he did. He had a great capacity for falling in love with the wrong people. His taste seemed to give way under him so extraordinarily sometimes. He fascinated me by his appearance; he was so neatly made, like a swordstick that fits just so. Occasionally his conversation was beautifully funny and quite unmalicious. I object strongly to pictures of Maugham as if he were a second-rate Hollywood producer in the lavish age."

"All the way from Maugham and de Maupassant and Chekhov to Ring Lardner the short story has served to portray the characteristics, the habits, the manners, the morals, the emotions of a nation, a whole people."

"The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety."

"The crown of literature is poetry."

"No gray hairs streak my soul, no grandfatherly fondness there! I shake the world with the might of my voice, and walk—handsome, twentytwoyearold."

"It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection."

"I know just where I stand ... in the very first row of the second-raters."

"Martinis should never be shaken," he said. "They should always be stirred so that the molecules lie sensuously on top of each other . . ."

"I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."

"You know that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct."