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"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."
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"For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose."
"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."
"At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air."
"My brain has become my enemy. We fight over creation and his need for sleep."
"I have spent a good many years since-too many, I think-being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all."
"He kept seeing the brains dribbling down the wallpaper. It wasn't the killing that stayed on his mind, it was the spilled talent. A lifetime of honing and shaping torn apart in less than a second. All those stories, all those images, and what came out looked like so much oatmeal. What was the point?"
"When you aren't satisfied with what has already been done, make something better. That is the greatest responsibility and the true freedom of creativity. The freedom is in that it doesn't need to complain."
"Fresh, solid ideas feel like gifts to writers, therefore every morning is Christmas."
"We write to shed our sorrows and give strength to our spirit."
"My pen beats faster as I write with my heart."
Explore more quotes by W. Somerset Maugham
"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."
"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?"
"Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad."
"Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequence than to have a really affectionate mother."
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