Then there was Somerset Maugham, a grim figure; rat-eyed; dead man cheeked, unshaven; a criminal I should have said had I met him on a bus.
--
Virginia Woolf, Letter to Vanessa Bell, 2 November 1938, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. N. Nicolson and J. Trautmann (1975-80)William Somerset Maugham
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Somerset Maugham refers more than once to the pleasure of the Malayan morning - papaya and eggs and bacon and strong British tea taken while the air is cool and the sun awaits its sudden thrust into the green land....
Anthony Burgess
Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that "Nobody is any better than he ought to be."... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.
Norman Mailer
Goethe said, “The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing”; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: “I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary.” These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds.
Randall Jarrell
Oh, we'm come up from Somerset,
Where the cider apples grow,
We'm come to see your Majesty,
An' how the world do go.
And when you're wanting anyone,
If you'll kindly let us know,
We'll all come up from Somerset,
Because we loves you so!Fred Weatherly
America fears the unshaven legs, the unshaven men's cheeks, the aroma of perspiration, and the limp prick. Above all it fears the limp prick.
Walter Abish
Maugham, William Somerset
Mauldin, Bill
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