But the Bible is an oriental book. Its alien imagery has nothing to do with us.

To my mind King James's Bible has been a very harmful influence on English prose. I am not so stupid as to deny its great beauty. It is majestical. But the Bible is an oriental book. Its alien imagery has nothing to do with us. Those hyperboles, those luscious metaphors, are foreign to our genius. I cannot but think that not the least of the misfortunes that the Secession from Rome brought upon the spiritual life of our country is that this work for so long a period became the daily, and with many the only, reading of our people. Those rhythms, that powerful vocabulary, that grandiloquence, became part and parcel of the national sensibility.

W.S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 34

He had crossed out in pencil all the passages in the Book of Common Prayer that praised God

It is strange that the devout should think God can be pleased when they slavishly pay them to him. When I was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask me to stay with him in the country. He was a religious man and he read prayers to the assembled household every morning. But he had crossed out in pencil all the passages in the Book of Common Prayer that praised God. He said that there was nothing so vulgar as to praise people to their faces and, himself a gentleman, he could not believe that God was so ungentlemanly as to like it. At the time it seemed to me a curious eccentricity. I think now that my friend showed very good sense.

W.S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 262

I have read a good many books on the art of fiction and all ascribe very small value to the plot

As a writer of fiction I go back, through innumerable generations, to the teller of tales round the fire in the cavern that sheltered neolithic men. I have had some sort of story to tell and it has interested me to tell it. To me it has been a sufficient object in itself. It has been my misfortune that for some time now a story has been despised by the intelligent. I have read a good many books on the art of fiction and all ascribe very small value to the plot. (In passing I should like to say that I cannot understand the sharp distinction some clever theorists make between story and plot. A plot is merely the pattern on which the story is arranged.) From these books you would judge that it is only a hindrance to the intelligent author and a concession that he makes to the stupid demands of the public.

W.S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 216

The fact is that they [The English] are suspicious of form

The sermons that Henry James preached to the English on form in the novel aroused their interest, but have little affected their practice. The fact is that they are suspicious of form. They find in it a sort of airlessness; its constraint irks them; they feel that when the author has fixed upon his material a wilful shape life has slipped through his fingers.

W.S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 206

As soon as I could afford it I bought a house in Mayfair

It was fortunate for me that I suddenly achieved popularity as a dramatist and so was relieved of the necessity of writing a novel once a year to earn my living. I found plays easy to write; the notoriety they brought me was not unpleasing; and they earned for me enough money to enable me to live less straitly than I had been obliged to. I have never had the bohemian trait of being unconcerned for the morrow. I have never liked to borrow money. I have hated to be in debt. Nor has the squalid life had any attraction for me. I was not born in squalid circumstances. As soon as I could afford it I bought a house in Mayfair.

There are people who despise possessions. Of course when they say that it ill becomes the artist thus to cumber himself they may be right, but it is not a view that artists themselves have held. They have never lived from choice in the garrets in which their admirers like to see them. They have much more often ruined themselves by the extravagance with which they conducted themselves.

W.S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 169-70

In France a man who has ruined himself for women is generally regarded with sympathy and admiration

English is the only modern language in which it has been found necessary to borrow from the Latin a word with a depreciatory meaning, the word uxorious, for a man's devoted love for his wife. That love should absorb a man has seemed to them unworthy. In France a man who has ruined himself for women is generally regarded with sympathy and admiration; there is a feeling that it was worth while, and the man who has done it feels even a certain pride in the fact; in England he will be thought and will think himself a damned fool. That is why Antony and Cleopatra has always been the least popular of Shakespeare's greater plays. Audiences have felt that it was contemptible to throw away an empire for a woman's sake. Indeed if it were not founded on an accepted legend they would be unanimous in asserting that such a thing was incredible.

W. S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 137

Ibsen as we know had a meagre power of invention

Ibsen as we know had a meagre power of invention; his characters under different names are very dully repeated and his intrigue from play to play is little varied. It is not a gross exaggeration to say that his only gambit is the sudden arrival of a stranger who comes into a stuffy room and opens the windows; whereupon the people who were sitting there catch their death of cold and everything ends unhappily.

W. S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 131

They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved

It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved; they do not understand that what interests you is the way in which you have created the illusion. Anthony Trollope ceased to be read for thirty years because he confessed that he wrote at regular hours and took care to get the best price he could for his work.

W. S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 77-8

I still remember the rather absurd arguments that were held about the calling I should adopt

I still remember the rather absurd arguments that were held about the calling I should adopt. A suggestion was made that I should become a civil servant and my uncle wrote to an old Oxford friend of his who held an important position in the Home Office for his advice. It was that, owing to the system of examinations and the class of persons it had introduced into the government service, it was now no place for a gentleman. That settled that. It was finally decided that I should become a doctor.

W. S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 59-60

Immortality for literary productions lasts in any case but a few hundred years

I think few serious writers, by which I do not only mean writers of serious things, can be entirely indifferent to the fate that will befall their works after their death. It is pleasant to think, not that one may achieve immortality (immortality for literary productions lasts in any case but a few hundred years and then is seldom more than the immortality of the schoolroom) but that one may be read with interest by a few generations and find a place, however small, in the history of one's country's literature. But so far as I am concerned, I look upon this modest possibility with scepticism.

W. S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 11-12

I wonder if it matters that what they have aimed at is illusion

'Supposing there is no life everlasting? Think what it means if death is really the end of all things? They've [the nuns] given it all up for nothing. They've been cheated. They're dupes.'

Waddington reflected fir a little while.

'I wonder. I wonder if it matters that what they have aimed at is illusion. Their lives are in themselves beautiful. I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, an the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.'

W.S. Maugham, The painted veil (1925), 169-70 

Missionaries always have large dining-tables

The dining-room was small and the greater part of it was filled by an enormous table. On the walls were engravings of scenes from the Bible and illuminated texts.

'Missionaries always have large dining-tables,' Waddington explained. 'They get so much a year more for every child they have and they buy their tables when they marry so that there shall be plenty of room for little strangers.'

W.S. Maugham, The painted veil (1925), 77-78

 

Travel, mountain-climbing, dabbling in occult rituals, and financing the publication of luxurious editions of his own poetry

Of all the people who frequented the Chat Blanc, no one was more bizarre nor as interesting to Maugham as Aleister Crowley. An eccentric English poet and Satanist, Crowley had inherited £40,000, which he soon exhausted on travel, mountain-climbing, dabbling in occult rituals, and financing the publication of luxurious editions of his own poetry.

R. Calder, Willie: the life of W. Somerset Maugham

Kennington! What a place for a poet to die!

'I wish you had left him in Soho,' he said, with a wave of his long, thin hands. 'There was a touch of romance in that sordid attic. I could even bear it if it were Wapping or Shoreditch, but the respectability of Kennington! What a place for a poet to die!'

W. Somerset Maugham, Of human bondage (1915), 475

Enthusiasm was ill-bred. Enthusiasm was ungentlemanly.

It was Winks who summed up the general impression and put it into a form they all felt was conclusively damning
...

'He's very enthusiastic,' said Winks.

Enthusiasm was ill-bred. Enthusiasm was ungentlemanly. They thought of the Salvation Army wit its braying trumpets and its drums. Enthusiasm meant change. They had goose-flesh when they thought of all the pleasant old habits which stood in imminent danger. They hardly dared to look forward to the future at all.

W. Somerset Maugham, Of human bondage (1925), 65

I had not then acquired the technique that I flatter myself now enables me to deal competently with the works of modern artist

I had not then acquired the technique that I flatter myself now enables me to deal competently with the works of modern artist. If this were the place I could write a very neat little guide to enable the amateur of pictures to deal to the satisfaction of their painters with the most diverse manifestations of the creative instinct. There is the intense ‘By God!’ that acknowledges the power of the ruthless realist, the ‘It’s so awfully sincere’ that covers your embarrassment when you are shown the coloured photograph of an alderman’s widow, the low whistle that exhibits your admiration for the post-impressionist, the ‘Terribly amusing’ that expresses what you feel about the cubist, the ‘Oh!’ of one who is overcome, the ‘Ah!’ of him whose breath is taken away.

W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale (1930), 131-132

I could never quite understand what this meant, but I knew the consequences were disastrous

My imagination played with terrible possibilities. Bigamy, murder, and forgery. Very few villains in books failed to hold the threat of exposure of one of those crimes over some hapless female. Perhaps Mrs Driffield had backed a bill; I could never quite understand what this meant, but I knew the consequences were disastrous.

W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale (1930), 71

Roy has always sincerely believed what everyone else believed at the moment

Roy has always sincerely believed what everyone else believed at the moment. When he wrote novels about the aristocracy he sincerely believed that its members were dissipated and immoral, and yet had a certain nobility and an innate aptitude for governing the British Empire; when later he wrote of the middle classes he sincerely believed that they were the backbone of the country. His villains have always been villainous, his heroes heroic, and his maidens chaste

W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale (1930), 16

As a coda, this portrait of Roy, which goes on for some time, is apparently easily identified as Hugh Walpole, who on reading it reported 'Half-dressed sitting on my bed, picked up idly Maugham's Cakes and Ale. Read on with increasing horror. Unmistakable portrait of myself. Never slept' (Ibid, xii)