W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

I'm not particularly inventive. If you left me in а room and told me to write a novel, I wouldn't be able to do it. But if you gave me two years in a public library around the corner, I could. It all comes from sort of mixing the true and the invented. I'm not a fabulist. I'm more of a reporter.

In order to write about life first you must live it.

It’s not just the adage ‘write what you know,’ it’s about gathering up all of the knowledge and experience you’ve collected up to now to help you dive into the things you don’t know.

As a journalist, the details always tell the story.

As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

Why my interest in writers? Well, I'm one, and many of my friends are writers. I know what it's like to write. I'm interested in the creative process. I'm fascinated by the disparity between who we are on the outside, and what we have bubbling away inside us.

I get ideas from my own personal experiences, from my imagination, and from my research and from old stories.

So, the combination of looking at lots of different people and how they react to each other and how they relate to each other and waiting for that inspiration is the thing that allows me to keep writing.

The literary artist will ... portray what he knows, and little else. Imagination is built upon knowledge, and his dreams will rest upon his facts. He is worth to the world just about what he has learned from it, and no more.

I write about what I know, what I live, what I observe.

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

I believe in research you cannot do enough research; believability comes out of what's real.

If you set your story in Rome, Ireland or Sheboygan, for that matter, go there. If you're broke, set it in the town where you live, or where you grew up.

Well, one thing I'm really interested in, when I'm writing, is being accurate.

I came up with a story and I wrote it.

I don't have to go into outer space to write about an astronaut.

I've got research, I have my own life experience I can apply, and I have my imagination.

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

A writer's work is to witness things.

I never write about a place I don't know.

I ask questions. I watch the world. And what I have discovered is that the parts of my fiction that people most tell me are 'unbelievable' are those that are most closely based on the real, those least diluted by my imagination.

I think anything that anyone writes that's any good is going to have a lot of autobiography.

Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.

I use so much of myself in everything I do. I think every actor does because you have no one else to go to but yourself and your own imagination.