Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Hollywood gets reduced to a fruit bowl: glossy, ripe, identical. Maugham’s line is a blade disguised as a bon mot, the kind of social cruelty that lands because it’s delivered with effortless politeness. “Peaches” aren’t just attractive women; they’re a studio-supplied type: soft-focus femininity, sweet surface, standardized desirability. The joke pivots on monotony. If everyone is a peach, the peach stops being special. You start wanting an “apple” not because apples are inherently better, but because they disrupt the imposed uniform.

That one-word swap carries the real subtext. The apple is sharper, firmer, less perfumed; it suggests bite, tartness, maybe even intellect. It nods to Eve and temptation, yes, but also to choice: an apple is something you pick for yourself, not something arranged for you. Maugham is needling Hollywood’s machinery of beauty, where women become props for an industry that sells fantasy by sanding off particulars. The longing isn’t purely erotic; it’s aesthetic and moral fatigue.

Context matters. Maugham moved easily among elites and had a practiced eye for performance, including the social performances required in film circles. As a playwright, he knew how types flatten into roles. The line reads like a complaint about casting - and a confession about taste: he’s bored by what the town insists is irresistible, and he’s advertising that boredom as sophistication. The sting is that it indicts Hollywood while also objectifying its women; even the critique can’t quite stop sorting them into produce.