A Writer's Notebook

- William Somerset Maugham

1892

1

In this year I entered the Medical School of St. Thomas’s Hospital. I spent five years there. I carefully set down the dates on which I started my first notebooks, and these dates will, I hope, serve as an extenuation of their contents. My later notebooks are undated, indeed many of my notes were scribbled on a scrap of paper or the back of an envelope, and I have had to determine when they were written by their subject matter. It may be that here and there I am a year or two out; I do not think it is of any consequence.

2

Considering how foolishly people act and how pleasantly they prattle, perhaps it would be better for the world if they talked more and did less.

3

Music-hall songs provide the dull with wit, just as proverbs provide them with wisdom.

4

Good luck always brings merit, but merit very seldom brings good luck.

5

Maxims of the Vicar.

A parson is paid to preach, not to practise.

Only ask those people to stay with you or to dine with you, who can ask you in return.

“Do unto others as you would they should do unto you.” An excellent maxim—for others.

He always answered the contentions of the temperance people by saying that “God has ordered us to make use of the things of this world,” and he exemplified his reply by keeping himself well supplied with whisky and liqueurs, which, however, he kept carefully locked up in the sideboard. “It is not good for all people to drink spirits,” he said, “in fact it is a sin to put temptation in their way; and besides, they would not appreciate them at their true value.”

These observations fell from the lips of my uncle who was Vicar of Whitstable; I took them seriously, but looking back on them now, I am inclined to think that he was exercising at my expense a humour which I never suspected him of possessing.

6

Reading does not make a man wise; it only makes him learned.

7

Respectability is the cloak under which fools cover their stupidity.

8

No action is in itself good or bad, but only such according to convention.

9

An old maid is always poor. When a spinster is rich she is an unmarried woman of a certain age.

10

Genius should use mediocrity as ink wherewith to write its name in the annals of the world.