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William Somerset Maugham was an English writer, known for his plays, novels and short stories.
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science · English playwright and author (1874–1965) · playwright · novelist · physician writer · screenwriter · prose writer · literary critic · army scout · writer · physician · also William Somerset Maugham, W. Somerset Maugham, Somerset Maugham, Maugham
Born 25 January 1874 · Died 16 December 1965 · Q134942
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You know, a thing that has always struck me is people's fiendish eagerness to give anyone away. They pretend it's public spirit, I don't believe a word of it; I don't believe it's even, as a rule anyway, the desire for notoriety; I believe it's just due to the baseness of human nature that gets a kick out of injuring others. There's a whole mass of people who can't wait if they have the chance of doing down someone who's trying to get away with anything.
I'm beginning to think it's very hard to know what to believe in this world.
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“You know, a thing that has always struck me is people's fiendish eagerness to give anyone away. They pretend it's public spirit, I don't believe a word of it; I don't believe it's even, as a rule anyway, the desire for notoriety; I believe it's just due to the baseness of human nature that gets a kick out of injuring others. There's a whole mass of people who can't wait if they have the chance of doing down someone who's trying to get away with anything.”
“I'm beginning to think it's very hard to know what to believe in this world.”
“Love was only the dirty trick nature played on us to achieve the continuation of the species”
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“I grew conscious that I was no longer in touch with the public that patronises the theatre. This happens in the end to most dramatists, and they are wise to accept the warning. It is high time for them then to retire. I did so with relief.”
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Records three productions since the author's death: The Constant Wife directed by Gielgud and starring Ingrid Bergman in 1975; The Circle, starring Rex Harrison, Stewart Granger and Glynis Johns in 1989–90; and another p
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Robert McCrum concluded an article about Of Human Bondage – which he said "shows the author's savage honesty and gift for storytelling at their best":
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The reviewer in The New York Times wrote that the play had been criticised "for not having anything substantial to say about love, marriage or infidelity
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That Maugham occupies a paradoxical position in twentieth-century British literature
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“It's so wonderful to shut out the world for a few hours. Rest, peace, silence, solitude. You would think they were luxuries that only the very rich can afford, and yet they cost nothing. Strange that they should be so hard to come by.”
And 1970, adapted by dramatists including Roy Clarke, Simon Gray, Hugh Leonard, Simon Raven and Hugh Whitemore, "presented with scrupulous fidelity to [their] tone, attitude, and thematic intention"
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Died 1965-12-16.
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“Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.”
“If you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it. (ang.)”
“If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too. (ang.)”
“Why do nice women marry dull men? Because intelligent men won’t marry nice women. (ang.)”
“The trouble with our younger authors is that they are all in the sixties.”
“For in men (…) love is but an episode which takes its place among the other affairs of the day. (ang.)”
“American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers (ang.)”
“Money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.”
“There’s always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved. (ang.)”
“Tylko ludzie mali zawsze utrzymują się na swoim poziomie.”
“The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love. (ang.)”
“The tragedy of love is not death or separation. (…) The tragedy of love is indifference. (ang.)”
“Opis: często przypisywane jako odnoszące się do Monako.”
“Sentimentality is only sentiment that rubs you up the wrong way.”
“Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. (ang.)”
“My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.”
“In my twenties the critics said I was brutal, in my thirties they said I was flippant, in my forties they said I was cynical, in my fifties they said I was competent, and now in my sixties they say I am superficial. (ang.)”
“To eat well in England, you should have a breakfast three times a day.”
Looking Back, in which "he denigrated his late former wife, was dismissive of Haxton, and made a clumsy attempt to deny his homosexuality by claiming he was a red-blooded heterosexual"
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The foreign travel included a final trip to the far East
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On the recommendation of the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, and six years later – along with Churchill – he was one of the first five writers to be made a Companion of Literature
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Was invested as a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) by the Queen at a private audience in Buckingham Palace
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Awarded honorary doctor of the University of Toulouse (1947).
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Alan Searle became Maugham's secretary-companion for the rest of the author's life
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Stayed in his home as long as he could, but in June 1940 France surrendered; knowing himself to be proscribed by the Nazis (Joseph Goebbels denounced him personally), Maugham made his way to England in uncomfortable c
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“Aren't you missing a lot of fun? You know, one's young for such a little while.”
“I have no illusions about my literary position. There are but two important critics in my own country who have troubled to take me seriously and when clever young men write essays about contemporary fiction they never think of considering me. I do not resent it. It is very natural”
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Found his interest prompted less by the British expatriates than by Indian philosophers and ascetics: "As soon as the Maharajas realized that I didn't want to go on tiger hunts but that I was interested in seeing poet
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After which he abandoned the theatre and concentrated on novels and short stories
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“The Three Fat Women of Antibes”
Maugham published the novel Cakes and Ale, regarded by Connon as the most likely of the author's works to survive
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“You bloody fool, you've killed the wrong man.”
Citing Maugham as co-respondent
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And staged in New York in 1917, for a satisfactory but not unusual 112 performances, but when produced in the West End in 1923 it was played 548 times
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Some of the initial reviews were favourable but many, both in Britain and in the US, were unenthusiastic
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Syrie Wellcome became pregnant, and in September, while Maugham was on leave to be with her, she gave birth to their only child, Mary Elizabeth, known as Liza
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Began an affair with Syrie Wellcome, whom he had known since 1910
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Maugham wrote a further eight plays, but his stage successes did not completely distract him from writing novels
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Proposed to the actress Sue Jones, daughter of the playwright Henry Arthur Jones; she declined his offer
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After which she had a succession of partners, including the retailer Harry Gordon Selfridge
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And his last, Creatures of Circumstance, in 1947, with seven others between the two
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Published his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, a tale of working-class adultery and its consequences
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Studied medicine at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School in Lambeth
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And his uncle had to decide on his future
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Born 1874-01-25.
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