W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

I'm interested in what it means to be an American. I'm interested in what it means to live in America. I'm interested in the kind of country that we live in and leave our kids. I'm interested in trying to define what that country is.

There is something uniquely American about the motel: It speaks to the transient nature of America itself, one enabled and encouraged by our roads and highways.

America is a country in which I see the most persistant idealism and the blandest of cynicism and the race is on between its vitality and its decadence.

I think that America certainly has racism, I think that any industrialized country does. But when you see how many million fans Barack Obama has who are not black, it would lead one to the conclusion that millions of Americans are in fact not burdened by the albatross of racism.

America is definitely something I'm pretty excited about.

An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.

I don't really know what Americans are like. I've no idea. I know a few things about them. In my imagination, they have warm peachy hearts, whereas the English have horrible spiteful withered hearts - success in England inspires envy - in America, it inspires hope.

I travel up and down the country and I've been all around the middle of America for many years. Middle America is not one big mass of people with a proverbial beer in its hand, keeping the country down. That is not my experience of it and I don't labor under that misconception. And we have a long tradition of coming together through music in our country.

You can find your way across this country using burger joint the way a navigatior uses stars....We have munched Bridge burgers in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge and Cable burgers hard by the Golden Gate, Dixie burgers in the sunny South and Yankee Doodle burgers in the North....We had a Capitol Burger - guess where. And so help us, in the inner courtyard of the Pentagon, a Penta burger.

America, the country of my heart, my second home.

I loved your country [America] before I knew it.

Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.

One of the special beauties of America is that it is the only country in the world where you are not advised to learn the language before entering. Before I ever set out for the United States, I asked a friend if I should study American. His answer was unequivocal. "On no account," he said. "The more English you sound, the more likely you are to be believed."

An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means.There is no such thing in the country.

Something is very, very wrong with American culture. The signs are everywhere. I think the country is in almost terminal descent.

In America we have across the country, the entire world.

Last year, more Americans went to symphonies than went to baseball games. This may be viewed as an alarming statistic, but I think that both baseball and the country will endure.

Of course, one cannot get to know a country like the United States in short visits.

Americans have no capacity for abstract thought, and make bad coffee.

You know, we do a lot of complaining here in America. And that itself is something they can't do in a lot of other countries.

before one actually visits them, everyone tends to think of their favorite countries as one grand Disneyland filled with national monuments and historical treasures conveniently laid out for easy viewing, when what they really are filled with, of course, is people going to work, laundromats and places to buy rat poison.

I too have a certain idea of America. Moreover, I would not feel entitled to say that of any other country, except my own. This is not just sentiment, though I always feel ten years younger – despite the jet-lag – when I set foot on American soil: there is something so positive, generous, and open about the people – and everything actually works. I also feel, though, that I have in a sense a share of America.

It's the tradition of American writers getting away in order to see the country - to get a better view.

America is a country of strong families and strong values. My life's been blessed by both.

We, in America, are so screwed up when it comes to sex. That's all we can see.