William Somerset Maugham

Both these men are in love with Natasha, Count Rostov's younger daughter, and in her Tolstoy has created the most delightful girl in fiction. Nothing is so difficult as to portray a young girl who is at once charming and interesting. Generally the young girls of fiction are colorless (Amelia in Vanity Fair), priggish (Fanny in Mansfield Park), too clever by half (Constantia Durham in The Egoist), or little geese (Dora in David Copperfield), silly flirts or innocent beyound belief. It is understandable that they should be an awkward subject for the novelist to deal with, for at that tender age the personality is undeveloped. Similarly a painter can only make a face interesting when the vicissitudes of life, thought, love and suffering have given it character. In the portrait of a girl the best he can do is to represent the charm and beauty of youth. But Natasha is entirely natural. She is sweet, sensitive, and sympathetic, willful, childish, womanly already, idealistic, quick-tempered, warm-hearted, headstrong, capricious and in everything enchanting. Tolstoy created many women and they are wonderfully true to life, but never another who wins the affection of the reader as does Natasha.

Women are always glad to listen when you discourse upon love...

She gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she out into her answer.
"You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!"

Things don't get any easier by putting them off.

Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.

The sad Don Quixote of a worthless purpose.

The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.

It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.

At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.

It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.

Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.

People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.

He found himself now in the agreeable situation of being able to do what was best for others and at the same time what was convenient to himself.

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded.

The Riviera isn't only a sunny place for shady people.

You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind. Failure makes people bitter and cruel.'

We have long passed the Victorian Era when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.

Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother.