Quotes for Friday from W. Somerset Maugham's Theatre

I know that you can act me off the stage, but we get on together like a house on fire, and when you do go into management I think we'd make a pretty good team. [32]

I don't care. I'd rather marry him and be a failure than be a success and married to somebody else. [40]

A woman attracts men by her charm and hold them by their vices ... [113]

Only a woman knows what a woman can do. [134]

No, they don't, they mean pain and anguish, shame, ecstasy, heaven and hell; they mean the sense of living more intensely, and unutterable boredom; they mean freedom and slavery; they mean peace and unrest. [149]

Oh, my dear, life is so short and love is so transitory. The tragedy of life is that sometimes we get what we want. [193]

The bitterness of life is not death, the bitterness of life is that love dies. [196]

It's our weakness, not our strength, that endears us to those who love us. [217]

If one stripped you of your exhibitionism, if one took your technique away from you, if one peeled you as one peels an onion of skin after skin of pretence and insincerity, of tags of old parts and shreds of faked emotions, would one come upon a soul at last? [217]

One thinks the aristocracy are a bunch of nitwits, and then one of them suddenly comes out with something like that that's so damned good it takes your breath away. [240]

'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.' But there's the illusion, through that archway; it's we, the actors, who are the reality. ... They are our raw materials. We are the meaning of their lives. We take their silly little emotions and turn them into art, out of them we create beauty, and their significance is that they form the audience we must have to fulfil ourselves. They are the instruments on which we play, and what is an instrument without somebody to play on it? [241]

They say acting is only make-believe. That make-believe is the only reality. [242]

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