A Quote by Norman Mailer
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.
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This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.
The modern writer who has influenced me most is W. Somerset Maugham .
Many persons think a prophet must be a good deal better than anybody else. Suppose I would condescend - yes, I will call it condescend, to be a great deal better than any of you. I would be raised to the highest heaven; and who should I have to accompany me?
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
I always wrote everything - I wrote all the lyrics, I wrote all the melodies, everything; it's just somebody else sung it. And to me, the singer is nothing else than a different... like a bass player or a keyboard player - they're not more important than any other musician.
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.
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.
If I had the opportunity to give President Trump any advice, and I had to boil it down to one thing, I suppose it would be that nobody ever got better at any job by blaming everybody else whenever anything goes wrong.
If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere, too.
An artist, to achieve anything in art, has to finally do the thing that nobody else wants to do and nobody else has thought to do.
I had lived with my mother in anger and love - I suppose most daughters do - but my children only knew her in one way: As the lady who thought they were smarter than Albert Einstein. As the lady who thought they wrote better than William Shakespeare. As the lady who thought every picture they drew was a Rembrandt.
Suppose you read about a pill that you could take once a day to reduce anxiety and increase your contentment. Would you take it? Suppose further that the pill has a great variety of side effects, all of them good: increased self-esteem, empathy, and trust; it even improves memory. Suppose, finally, that the pill is all natural and costs nothing. Now would you take it? The pill exists. It is meditation.
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.
I don't know if you hear this often but I would say The Razor's Edge (loosely based on a great W. Somerset Maugham novel). This was Bill Murray's first dramatic role so everyone thought he stunk in this deep character but I thought he and the movie were great. The movie takes place over decades so you see Murray's character go from goofy playboy all the way to wiser, older person. It's basically a movie version of the journey I described.
Discovered W. Somerset Maugham in about 5th grade. Didn't understand the plots, but loved the descriptions.
We always imagine that there's got to be somewhere else better than where we are right now; this is the Great Somewhere Else we all carry around in our heads. We believe Somewhere Else is out there for us if only we could find it. But there's no Somewhere Else. Everything is right here...Make this your paradise or make this your hell. The choice is entirely yours. Really.
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