Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham is selling discipline with a knife hidden inside it. He grants “habits” their comforting status - the routines that make a page appear, the practiced turns of phrase that keep a career solvent - then immediately strips them of moral dignity. Useful, yes. Sacred, never. The line reads like advice to younger writers, but its real target is the writer’s oldest vice: mistaking repetition for craft.

The phrasing is ruthlessly conditional. “Only useful if” turns habit into a tool, not an identity. Then “broken” arrives with a tiny shock of violence, a reminder that changing your mind is not a gentle act. Maugham’s subtext is pragmatic and faintly cynical: you don’t outgrow habits because you’ve become wiser; you abandon them because they’ve stopped paying rent. That’s not romantic, and that’s precisely why it works. It rejects the artist-myth of the signature style as destiny. Style, for Maugham, is a temporary alliance between you and what currently gets results.

Context matters: Maugham built success across fiction and the stage, writing with a professional’s eye for what lands with an audience. A playwright especially knows that yesterday’s “reliable” beat can become tomorrow’s dead air once the room changes. So the sentence doubles as a cultural warning: in art and in life, the habits that once protected you can quietly turn into cages - and the longer you call them “principles,” the harder they are to escape.