trivia questions

The chapter headings "Du Côté de Chez Beaver" and "Du Côté de Chez Tod" in Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust are literary bows to ...
a. Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
b. Samuel Beckett's En Attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot)
c. Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time
d. W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge
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W. Somerset Maugham

author profile

born

January 25, 1874

died

December 16, 1965

gender

male

place of birth

Paris, France

genre

Literature & Fiction

about this author

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W. Somerset Maugham's passionate semi-autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage was published in 1915 and remains his most famous book. As a young man Maugham trained to be a doctor and his experiences as an intern in the London slums led him to write Liza of Lambeth (1897). The novel was a success and Maugham quickly traded the surgeon's knife for the writer's pen. Maugham wrote plays, novels, criticism and essays, and soon became one of Britain's most popular authors; in 1908 he had four plays running simultaneously on London stages. In later years Maugham became known as a master of the short story. He travelled extensively and based many of his tales in exotic locales, particularly the South Seas. "Rain," the tale of a straitlac...more

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books by W. Somerset Maugham

avg rating: 3.97 | 17,961 ratings | 2,186 reviews | 263 distinct works | 102 fans

	Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham avg rating 4.03 — 4,208 ratings — published 1915 86 editions	my rating:
	The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham avg rating 4.15 — 4,068 ratings — published 1943 35 editions	my rating:
	The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham avg rating 3.75 — 3,085 ratings — published 1991 26 editions	my rating:
	Moon And Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham avg rating 3.97 — 879 ratings — published 1919 98 editions	my rating:
	Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham avg rating 3.72 — 534 ratings — published 1930 18 editions	my rating:
	Up at the Villa by W. Somerset Maugham avg rating 3.66 — 331 ratings — published 1941 15 editions	my rating:
	Collected Stories by W. Somerset Maugham avg rating 4.28 — 265 ratings — published 1921 8 editions	my rating:
	Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham avg rating 3.99 — 205 ratings — published 1937 16 editions	my rating:
	The Magician by W. Somerset Maugham avg rating 3.52 — 199 ratings — published 1908 36 editions	my rating:
	The Summing Up (Penguin 20th Century Classic) by W. Somerset Maugham avg rating 3.95 — 115 ratings — published 1977 15 editions	my rating:

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quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

"The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love."
— W. Somerset Maugham

tags: love

164 people liked it

"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. "
— W. Somerset Maugham

94 people liked it

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."
— W. Somerset Maugham

tags: writing

91 people liked it

see all W. Somerset Maugham's quotes »

polls

Sometimes the first line of a book just grabs you by the nostrils and drags your fool head into its pages, preventing escape in any way, shape or form. Which of these opening lines has its phalanges most firmly planted in your nasal cavities?

"He— for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it— was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters."

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

37 votes, 2.5%

"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

Scaramouche by Raphael Sabatini

48 votes, 3.2%

"Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women."

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

19 votes, 1.3%

"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."

The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

12 votes, 0.8%

“'When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,' Papa would say, 'she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.'”

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

11 votes, 0.7%

"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink."

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

78 votes, 5.3%

"Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden."

The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace

15 votes, 1.0%

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

54 votes, 3.6%

“'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.'”

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

30 votes, 2.0%

"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up."

The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton

16 votes, 1.1%

"Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person."

Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler

24 votes, 1.6%

"I have never begun a novel with more misgiving."

The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

11 votes, 0.7%

"What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?"

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino

3 votes, 0.2%

"It was a pleasure to burn."

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

46 votes, 3.1%

"It was the day my grandmother exploded."

The Crow Road by Iain Banks

32 votes, 2.2%

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis

73 votes, 4.9%

"Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation."

Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish

14 votes, 0.9%

"For a long time, I went to bed early."

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

13 votes, 0.9%

"The moment one learns English, complications set in."

Chromos by Felipe Alfau

10 votes, 0.7%

"All this happened, more or less."

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

43 votes, 2.9%

"I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man."

Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

25 votes, 1.7%

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Neuromancer by William Gibson

34 votes, 2.3%

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show."

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

23 votes, 1.6%

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

62 votes, 4.2%

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

Murphy by Samuel Beckett

8 votes, 0.5%

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

1984 by George Orwell

45 votes, 3.0%

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

42 votes, 2.8%

"Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu."

Waiting by Ha Jin

8 votes, 0.5%

"Call me Ishmael."

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

22 votes, 1.5%

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

The Hobbit: Or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien

42 votes, 2.8%

"As Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of uneasy dreaming, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

38 votes, 2.6%

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

44 votes, 3.0%

"Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much."

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling

46 votes, 3.1%

"Mother died today."

The Stranger by Albert Camus

24 votes, 1.6%

"When I was three and Bailey was four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed - 'To Whom It May Concern' - that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson."

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

4 votes, 0.3%

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun."

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

52 votes, 3.5%

"There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife."

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

45 votes, 3.0%

"Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing."

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

8 votes, 0.5%

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins."

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

40 votes, 2.7%

"Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror."

Herbert West: Reanimator and Other Stories by H.P. Lovecraft

5 votes, 0.3%

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

75 votes, 5.1%

"When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere."

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

14 votes, 0.9%

"All children, except one, grow up."

Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

51 votes, 3.4%

"My lady and I are being shut up in a tower for seven years"

Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale

4 votes, 0.3%

"'Barabbas came to us by sea', the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy."

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

5 votes, 0.3%

"No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were being scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

18 votes, 1.2%

"Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature."

The Debut by Anita Brookner

6 votes, 0.4%

"There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim and we sat in the Korova milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening."

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

16 votes, 1.1%

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany."

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

39 votes, 2.6%

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

5 votes, 0.3%

Bah! Foolish poll-maker-person! The nostril seizing power of these paltry lines is minimal, at best! Look to the comments section where I shall carefully type out my choice, which you have so imprudently omitted!

42 votes, 2.8%

1481 total votes

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