Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham’s line is a quiet takedown of a culture that fetishizes youthful “creativity” while treating adulthood as a slow administrative death. As a playwright who lived off craft, not myth, he’s smuggling a work ethic into what sounds like a compliment: imagination isn’t a birthright that fades, it’s a muscle. The provocation sits in “contrary to common belief,” a sideways jab at Romantic-era sentimentality where inspiration arrives like weather, and the young are assumed to have a monopoly on vision.

The intent is corrective, but also a little sly. By insisting imagination is “more powerful in the mature,” Maugham reverses the usual timeline. Youth has novelty; maturity has range. The older mind has raw material: disappointments, compromises, long memories, the humiliations that teach you how people actually behave. For a dramatist, that’s gasoline. Stage work depends on observing patterns, building causality, writing desire and self-deception with precision. That comes easier after you’ve watched yourself do it.

The subtext carries a moral: if you feel your imaginative life shrinking, the problem isn’t age, it’s neglect. “Exercise” implies routine, repetition, even boredom - the unglamorous conditions under which most art gets made. In the early 20th century, when Maugham was publishing and producing at scale, professionalism was its own rebellion against the suffering-genius pose. His claim dignifies longevity: maturity doesn’t dilute imagination; it concentrates it, if you keep showing up.