W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

...One reason I became a writer was that I figured out that if you call yourself a writer, you can read all you want and people think that you are working.

The profession of letters is, after all, the only one in which one can make no money without being ridiculous.

If the rewards to authors go down, simple economics says there will be fewer authors. It's not that people won't burn with the passion to write. The number of people wanting to be novelists is probably not going to decline - but certainly the number of people who are going to be able to make a living as authors is going to dramatically decrease.

If you asked someone, 'Can you play the violin?' and he says, 'I don't know, I have not tried, perhaps I can,' you laugh at him. Whereas about writing, people always say: 'I don't know, I have not tried,' as though one had only to try and one would become a writer.

I went to college to study hospitality. I quickly got out of that and realized that what I liked to do was write.

Writing offers fairly large rewards to a few successful people, but the rewards come late, and most writers are failures.

People who can write a book usually do.

I always wanted to write. While I was on a long surf trip, supporting myself with various day jobs, I was working hard on a novel. My third novel, in fact.

The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn't very good.

I advise those who want to become writers to study veterinary medicine, which is easier. You don't want to be a writer unless you have no choice - and if you have no choice, good luck to you.

I've always been a writer, actually. Not many people assume that, but I kinda keep quiet about anything that I do until I'm ready to show it. It keeps me humble and also makes me work towards a goal.

There is probably no hell for authors in the next world - they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this.

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is.

I've been a writer longer than I've been an actor. I wrote short stories like crazy when I was in high school and college. I worked in advertising before I moved to L.A. to pursue acting.

The number of people who can copulate properly may be few; the number who can write well are infinitely fewer.

I first tried a novel when I was 14. First finished one when I was 16. First started working on stuff that had a chance of being salable in my early 20s, then didn't write much fiction at all because I was in grad school.

Though The Kite Runner was my first completed novel, I had been writing on and off for most of my life, primarily short stories, and primarily for myself.

I always want to challenge myself as a writer. I consider myself more of a writer than I do a director.

Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it.

I don't really write beautifully naturally, unlike some people.

Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.

I have more to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner.

A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.

Nothing is more painful to me than the disdain with which people treat second-rate authors, as if there were room only for the first-raters.

Wrote my first "novel" when I was six. Studied a bit in college, but then pursued history... But when I started writing professionally, it was mostly learn as you go.