Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Art, for Maugham, isn’t a portfolio piece; it’s a travelogue from the interior. “Every production” is a deliberately unforgiving phrase: not the masterpieces, not the inspired exceptions, but the whole output. He’s laying down a private standard that doubles as a public provocation. If the work doesn’t carry the mark of risk, it’s not merely mediocre - it’s suspect.

The word “adventure” does the heavy lifting. It implies motion, danger, and the possibility of getting lost. Maugham isn’t romanticizing suffering so much as insisting on stakes. An “adventure of his soul” frames creation as a moral and psychological expedition: you go somewhere in yourself you didn’t already control, you come back changed, and the work is the evidence. Subtext: technique is necessary but insufficient; polish without peril reads as social performance.

Context matters. Maugham made his name in the commercial theatre and later became a master of lucid, widely readable fiction - a writer often dismissed as too smooth, too professional, too accessible to be “deep.” This line pushes back against that prejudice and, more subtly, against his own success. It’s a reminder that entertainment can be evasive, even when it’s expertly built. For a playwright, whose job is to craft surfaces (dialogue, plot, stage business), “soul” is a pointed insistence that the surface must be earned.

The sentence also carries a quiet gendered timestamp: “his soul” universalizes the artist as male, typical of the era, even as the demand it makes - turn inner life into public artifact - remains bracingly contemporary.