W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

There's actually nothing interesting about me except what I write.

All men are creative but few are artists.

Some guys can run fast, some guys can sing, I found I could take photographs that people were interested in.

I was never a skilled artist or anything like that - never a rebel.

I would sometimes sit in a crowded restaurant, and say, 'You know, I'm the only person in this restaurant who can't draw.'

I do believe everyone on this earth is an artist - some people more than others. But I do believe we are all artists in a certain way. We all have unique abilities. There are people who are meant to make it their life, and that is a different kind of person who would choose to be on that path.

But I'm not an artist. Maybe an artist with a small a.

I do think that I'm not good at making pretty things. It doesn't come so naturally for me.

I never had the dream to be a great designer. My focus was just to do beautiful things.

I was no good at anything else at school. But I was good at one thing, which was creativity.

I think when you come from a house full of artists, everyone's got their niche.

I'm an artist in my heart.

I truly believe that everyone can be creative; you just need to find your form of expression.

I never claimed to be a great photographer.

I always love working with other creative talent.

There are lots of artists I respect and admire.

I have sketched since a young age, so there's always been an artistic side, a visual side to my personality.

In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.

Genius gives birth, talent delivers.

A great song can come from anybody. A great performance can come from anybody. It doesn't matter who you are, and that's truly what I believe.

You can't make a great musician or a great photographer if the magic isn't there.

There is the same difference between talent and genius that there is between a stone mason and a sculptor

I strive for what you do find in Shakespeare's work - that there is a definite humanity and a definite character behind the writing in the sonnets, and it's very real because it's so deeply personal. I try to aspire to that in what I do.

One of the marks of true genius is a quality of abundance. A rich, rollicking abundance, enough to give indigestion to ordinary people. Great artists turn it out in rolls, in swatches. They cover whole ceilings with paintings, they chip out a mountainside in stone, they write not one novel but a shelf full. It follows that some of their work is better than other. As much as a third of it may be pretty bad. Shall we say this unevenness is the mark of their humanity - of their proud mortality as well as of their immortality?

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.