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W. Somerset Maugham Quotes about Giving

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I'll give you my opinion of the human race in a nutshell... their heart's in the right place, but their head is a thoroughly inefficient organ.

I'll give you my opinion of the human race in a nutshell... their heart's in the right place, but their head is a thoroughly inefficient organ.

W. Somerset Maugham
Heart, Race, Giving
The Summing Up

You tend to close your eyes to truth, beauty and goodness because they give no scope to your sense of the ridiculous.

W. Somerset Maugham
Happiness, Eye, Giving
W. Somerset Maugham (2010). “The Summing Up”, p.65, Random House

No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point; but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess.

W. Somerset Maugham
Writing, Character, Giving

Vaguely, as when you are studying a foreign language and read a page which at first you can make nothing of, till a word or a sentence gives you a clue; and on a sudden suspicion, as it were, of the sense flashes across your troubled wits, vaguely she gained an inkling into the workings of Walter's mind. It was like a dark and ominous landscape seen by a flash of lightning and in a moment hidden again by the night. She shuddered at what she saw.

W. Somerset Maugham
Dark, Night, Giving

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.

W. Somerset Maugham
Giving, Missing, Fiction

I did not believe him capable of love. That is an emotion in which tenderness is an essential part, but Strickland had no tenderness either for himself or for others; there is in love a sense of weakness, a desire to protect, an eagerness to do good and to give pleasure--if not unselfishness, at all events a selfishness which marvellously conceals itself; it has in it a certain diffidence.

W. Somerset Maugham
Believe, Giving, Desire
W. Somerset Maugham (2006). “The Moon and Sixpence”, p.84, Courier Corporation

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