W. Somerset Maugham

Who was W. Somerset Maugham?

William Somerset Maugham CH was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest paid author during the 1930s.

After losing both his parents by the age of 10, Maugham was raised by a paternal uncle who was emotionally cold. Not wanting to become a lawyer like other men in his family, Maugham eventually trained and qualified as a doctor. The first run of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time.

During the First World War, he served with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps, before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service, for which he worked in Switzerland and Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. During and after the war, he traveled in India and Southeast Asia; all of these experiences were reflected in later short stories and novels.

Famous Quotes:

• You know that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.
• American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.
• From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.
• Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
• There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.
• It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.
• It's a funny thing about life: if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.
• I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.
• The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.
• Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practiced at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.