A Quote by George Orwell

The modern writer who has influenced me most is W. Somerset Maugham .

George Orwell

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Influenced Me Modern Most Writer

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George Orwell
British - Novelist
June 25, 1903 - January 21, 1950

The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.

George Orwell

It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.

Gore Vidal

I don't feel when I'm writing that I'm drawing from any other writer, but of course I must be. The writers I've admired have been not so very different from myself: Evelyn Waugh, for example, that kind of crystalline prose. And I've always admired W. Somerset Maugham more than any other writer.

Charles McCarry

At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham's 'Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.' To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester's works and the little urn that contains my mother's ashes.

Wilbur Smith

Discovered W. Somerset Maugham in about 5th grade. Didn't understand the plots, but loved the descriptions.

W. P. Kinsella

I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel.

Martin Amis

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

Somebody asked Somerset Maugham about his place in the pantheon of writers, and he said, "I'm in the very front row of the second rate." I'm sort of haunted by that.

Stephen King

Writer Somerset Maugham, after his parents deaths, spent a few stultifying years in his uncle's vicarage. Later, in his teens at a boarding-school, having lost his belief in the existence of God said: "The whole horrible structure, based not on the love of God, but on the fear of hell, tumbled down like a house of cards."

Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon

Modern Art is being used to index me. Surely it was a source but photographers have influenced Modern Art quite as deeply as they have been influenced, maybe more. Anyway painters don't have a copyright on M. A. We were all born in the same upheaval.

Edward Weston

It is said Somerset Maugham traveled the world with a notebook to learn the essence of life and Kafka sat in a room for the same objective. Yet Kafka came out with a better world-view.

U. R. Ananthamurthy

I read books more than I go out. As a matter of fact, I get a little concerned about some of my anti-social habits. I will choose a night with Somerset Maugham or Russell Banks over a crowded bar any day.

Julie Bowen

Janet Malcolm's probably the writer I most admire and who's most influenced me.

Helen Garner

It doesn't matter if I'm only to be gone four days, as in this case; I take six months' supply of reading material everywhere. Anyone who needs further explication of this eccentricity can find it usefully set out in the first pages of W. Somerset Maugham's story "The Book-Bag.

Robin McKinley

Somerset is the first proper country county you come to in the West, which isn't dependent on London and isn't full of commuters. Somerset is full of the most fantastically interesting people.