Cakes and Ale Quotes

“It's no good trying to keep up old friendships. It's painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard

“The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“The ideal has many names and beauty is but one of them.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind. ”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard

“It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer. ”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard

“As we grow older we become more conscious of the complexity, incoherence, and unreasonableness of human beings; this indeed is the only excuse that offers for the middle-aged or elderly writer, whose thoughts should more properly be turned to graver matters, occupying himself with the trivial concerns of imaginary people. For if the proper study of mankind is man it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial, and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard

“I have noticed that when I am most serious people are apt to laugh at me, and indeed when after a lapse of time I have read passages that I wrote from the fullness of my heart I have been tempted to laugh at myself. It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country. This is not so strange when you reflect that 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...”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard

“The ideal has many names and beauty is but one of them...
Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all: that is why the criticism of art, except in so far as it is unconcerned with beauty and therefore with art, is tiresome...
Beauty is that which satisfies the aesthetic instinct. But who wants to be satisfied? It is only the dullard that enough is as good as a feast. Let us face it: beauty is but a bore.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“I had not then acquired the technique that I flatter myself now enables me to deal competently with the works of modern artist. If this were the place I could write a very neat little guide to enable the amateur of pictures to deal to the satisfaction of their painters with the most diverse manifestations of the creative instinct. There is the intense ‘By God!’ that acknowledges the power of the ruthless realist, the ‘It’s so awfully sincere’ that covers your embarrassment when you are shown the coloured photograph of an alderman’s widow, the low whistle that exhibits your admiration for the post-impressionist, the ‘Terribly amusing’ that expresses what you feel about the cubist, the ‘Oh!’ of one who is overcome, the ‘Ah!’ of him whose breath is taken away.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“I did not pay much attention, and since it seemed to prolong itself I began to meditate upon the writer’s life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world’s indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit with a good grace to its hazards. He depends upon a fickle public. He is at the mercy of journalists who want to interview him and photographers who want to take his picture, of editors who harry him for copy and tax gatherers who harry him for income tax, of persons of quality who ask him to lunch and secretaries of institutes who ask him to lecture, of women who want to marry him and women who want to divorce him, of youths who want his autograph, actors who want parts and strangers who want a loan, of gushing ladies who want advice on their matrimonial affairs and earnest young men who want advice on their compositions, of agents, publishers, managers, bores, admirers, critics, and his own conscience. But he has one compensation. Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as the theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“I began to meditate upon the writer's life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world's indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit to a good grace of its hazards...But he has one compensation, Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as a theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“Roy has always sincerely believed what everyone else believed at the moment.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“Enjoy yourself while you have the chance, I say; we shall all be dead in a hundred years and what will anything matter then?”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“I saw that Roy was not inclined to be amused. I was not annoyed, for I am quite used to people not being amused at my jokes. I often think that the purest type of the artist is the humorist who laughs alone at his own jests.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“the hopes that had been cherished there, the bright visions of the future, the flaming passion of youth; the regrets, the disillusion, the weariness, the resignation; so much had been felt in that room, by so many, the whole gamut of human emotion, that it seemed strangely to have acquired a troubling and enigmatic personality of its own.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“Don’t talk to me about the country. The doctor said I was to go there for six weeks last summer. It nearly killed me, I give you my word. The noise of it. All them birds singin’ all the time, and the cocks crowin’ and the cows mooin’. I couldn’t stick it. When you’ve lived all the years I ’ave in peace and quietness you can’t get used to all that racket goin’ on all the time.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“The crown of literature is poetry. It is the end and aim. It is the sublimest activity od the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“She had the serenity of a summer evening when the light fades slowly from the unclouded sky.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“Everything was soft about her, her voice, her smile, her laugh; her eyes, which were small and pale, had the softness of flowers; her manner was as soft as the summer rain.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“I have great affection for you, Roy" I answered, "but I don't think you are the sort of person I'd care to have breakfast with.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“Owing to the rise of prices Mrs. Hudson was able to get more for her rooms than in my day, and I think in her modest way she was quite well off. But of course people wanted a lot nowadays. “You wouldn’t believe it, first I ’ad to put in a bathroom, and then I ’ad to put in the electric light, and then nothin’ would satisfy them but I must ’ave a telephone. What they’ll want next I can’t think.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“laugh while you’ve got the chance, you won’t laugh much when you’re dead and buried.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“I do not know if others are like myself, but I am conscious that I cannot contemplate beauty long.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“Beauty does not look with good grace on the timid advances of Humour.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“You’re so sharp you’ll cut yourself if you don’t look out,”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“He was so pleasant that his fellow writers, his rivals and contemporaries, forgave him even the fact that he was a gentleman.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“Beauty is a blind alley. It is a mountain peak which once reached leads nowhere […] Beauty is that which satisfies the aesthetic instinct. But who wants to be satisfied? It is only to the dullard that enough is as good as a feast. Let us face it: beauty is a bit of a bore.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“I accompanied her down to the first floor and she knocked at a door. She was told to come in, and when she opened it I caught sight of a stout woman with gray hair elaborately marcelled. She was reading a book. Apparently everyone at the Bear and Key was interested in literature.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“On his advice I read The Craft of Fiction by Mr. Percy Lubbock, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Henry James; after that I read Aspects of the Novel by Mr. E. M. Forster, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Mr. E. M. Forster; then I read The Structure of the Novel by Mr. Edwin Muir, from which I learned nothing at all.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale