“The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.”
More from Somerset Maugham on Writing
“There are three secrets to writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.”
“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
“I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.”
“If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.”
“Writing is the supreme solace.”
“To write simply is as difficult as to be good.”
“The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.”
“You cannot write unless you write much.”
“we do not write as we want but as we can”
“We do not write as we want but as we can.”
Others on Writing
Ernest Hemingway
17 quotes“A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.”
Virginia Woolf
12 quotes“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.”
Kafka
10 quotes“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
Ray Bradbury
9 quotes“And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and...”
Flaubert
9 quotes“Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of gen...”
Jorge Luis Borges
8 quotes“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
Flannery O'Connor
7 quotes“The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.”
Harold Bloom
7 quotes“All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.”
William Faulkner
6 quotes“A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.”
Milan Kundera
6 quotes“Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.”
Vladimir Nabokov
6 quotes“The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview,...”