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- Read the works of W. Somerset Maugham online at The Literature Page
- A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life.
- W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, 1943
- All important persons have about them someone in a subordinate position who has their ear. These dependents are very susceptible to slights, and, when they are not treated as they think they should be, will by well-directed shafts, constantly repeated, poison the minds of their patrons against those who have provoked their animosity. It is well to keep in with them.
- W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, 1943
- American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.
- W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, 1943
- 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.
- W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, 1943
- I like manual labor. Whenever I've got waterlogged with study, I've taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating.
- W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, 1943
- I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.
- W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, 1943
- I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?
- W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, 1943
- It is very difficult to know people and I don't think one can ever really know any but one's own countrymen. For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives' tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay, you can only know them if you have lived them.
- W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, 1943
- It's a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called, but few are chosen.
- W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, 1943
- It's always difficult to make conversation with a drunk, and there's no denying it, the sober are at a disadvantage with him.
- W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, 1943
- Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy.
- W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, 1943
- Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.
- W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, 1943
- People do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are.
- W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, 1943
- Perhaps the most important use of money - It saves time. Life is so short, and there's so much to do, one can't afford to waste a minute; and just think how much you waste, for instance, in walking from place to place instead of going by bus and in going by bus instead of by taxi.
- W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, 1943
- The average American can get into the kingdom of heaven much more easily than he can get into the Boulevard St. Germain.
- W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, 1943
- The dead look so terribly dead when they're dead.
- W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, 1943
- The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.
- W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, 1943
- There are few things so pleasant as a picnic eaten in perfect comfort.
- W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, 1943
- Unfortunately sometimes one can't do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.
- W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, 1943
- We didn't think much in the air corps of a fellow who wangled a cushy job out of his C.O. by buttering him up. It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery. I should have thought the worship most pleasing to him was to do your best according to your lights.
- W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge, 1943
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