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"You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism."
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"When one is frightened of the truth then it is never the whole truth that one has an inkling of."
"The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time."
"I knew there were no ghosts in there, but on the other hand, what if there were?"
"To forsake wisdom is to seek folly, to seek folly is to seek evil, to seek evil is to be in the arms of the devil, and to be in the arms of the devil is be in the arms of death."
Explore more quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
"I do not attachany exaggerated importance to my poetical works. Life isthere to be lived rather than to be written about. My aimis to search out the manifold experience that it offers,wringing from each moment what of emotion it presents.I look upon my writing as a graceful accomplishmentwhich does not absorb but rather adds pleasure toexistence. And as for posterity-damn posterity."
"It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule. You are puzzled because you cannot get over the idea that pleasures are only of the sense; but, child, a man who dies for his country dies because he likes it as surely as a man eats pickled cabbage because he likes it."
"I thought with melancholy how an author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do."
"A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute."
"Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour."
"What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?"
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