Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham isn’t praising honesty; he’s quietly demoting it. “Anyone can tell the truth” lands like a shrug at virtue, a reminder that facts and frankness are cheap currency in a room full of talkers. The real prestige, he suggests, belongs to compression: the ability to turn an observation into an epigram, a sentence so polished it feels inevitable. In other words, truth is available; style is scarce.

Coming from a playwright, the line reads like backstage doctrine. Theater doesn’t survive on accurate statements about human nature; it survives on lines that stick, that can be carried out of the auditorium and repeated at dinner. The epigram is social technology: portable, memorable, and slightly weaponized. It doesn’t just report truth, it packages it with a snap of wit that makes the audience complicit. You don’t merely agree; you enjoy agreeing.

The subtext is also a little defensive, even elitist. Epigrams are a way for a writer to keep control of a messy reality by sealing it into a neat capsule. That neatness can clarify, but it can also dominate: an epigram ends an argument by sounding final. Maugham knows the danger and courts it anyway. His era prized the well-made play and the well-turned phrase; the line doubles as a manifesto for craft in a culture that mistakes sincerity for depth. Truth may be democratic. The epigram is aristocracy, earned through ruthless editing and a taste for sting.