A Quote by W. Somerset Maugham
Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.
Related Quotes
Habits like blogging often and regularly, writing down the way you think, being clear about what you think are effective tactics, ignoring the burbling crowd and not eating bacon. All of these are useful habits.
The teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists.
The universe does not have laws. It has habits. And habits can be broken.
Neither love nor fire can subsist without perpetual motion; both cease to live so soon as they cease to hope, or to fear.
In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much.
I'm a full-time believer in writing habits...You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows awayOf course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that's all the energy I have, but I don't let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place.
I'll give up my bad habits as soon as equally satisfying good habits become available.
The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years - responses to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters - stay with you, mark you, become you. The cost of discontinuity (that pattern still imposed on women) is such a weight of things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that everything starts up something else in me; what should take weeks take me sometimes months to write; what should take months, takes years.
Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.
Habits are formed by the repetition of particular acts. They are strengthened by an increase in the number of repeated acts. Habits are also weakened or broken, and contrary habits are formed by the repetition of contrary acts.
Broken bottles, broken plates, broken switches, broken gates. Broken dishes, broken parts, streets are filled with broken hearts.
Sorrow has the fortunate peculiarity that it preys upon itself. It dies of starvation. Since it is essentially an interruption of habits, it can be replaced by new habits. Constituting, as it does, a void, it is soon filled up by a real horror vacuum.
Diplomats are useful only in fair weather. As soon as it rains they drown in every drop.
Public order is a fragile thing, and if you don't fix the first broken window, soon all the windows will be broken.
Principles are only tools in the hands of God; they will soon be thrown away when they are no longer useful.
Character is the sum of one's good habits (virtues) and bad habits (vices). These habits mark us and affect the ways in which we respond to life's events and challenges. Our character is our profile of habits and dispositions to act in certain ways.
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