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"The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes."
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"All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose."
"With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed."
"The older I get, the more I seek to use a plain prose style, concentrating more on story."
"I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James."
"The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes."
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."
"If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself."
"Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour."
"If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write."
"I began to meditate upon the writer's life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world's indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit to a good grace of its hazards...But he has one compensation, Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as a theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man."
"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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