Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham’s barb lands because it refuses the polite lie that boredom is noble. He’s not confessing to low standards; he’s indicting a literary culture that confuses “serious” with “dull.” A timetable and a catalogue are the very emblems of the unliterary: functional, impersonal, built to be skimmed. By calling them “more entertaining than half the novels,” he flips the prestige hierarchy and quietly dares the novelist to defend the page with something more than good intentions.

The intent is partly theatrical. As a playwright, Maugham knew an audience’s attention is a hard currency: you earn it moment by moment or you lose the room. Timetables and catalogues, for all their dryness, have stakes. They point to movement, desire, money, consequence: where you can go, what you can buy, what exists in the world. Many novels, he implies, offer only the faint virtue of being novels, padded with mannered description and social pieties, asking to be admired rather than read.

Subtext: boredom is a moral failure of craft. Maugham isn’t anti-literary; he’s anti-pretension, and he’s pro-clarity, pace, and observable life. The context matters too: writing in an era when the English novel could drift toward heavy moralizing or class-pageantry, he positions himself with the impatient reader, not the dutiful critic. It’s a line that flatters the public while warning writers: if you can’t beat a train schedule for suspense, you’re not producing art - you’re producing furniture.