Wit & Attitude Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

The line lands like a courteous warning with a knife behind it: the audience is not as dumb as your worst instincts hope. Maugham, a playwright who made his living watching rooms react in real time, isn’t offering a genteel compliment to the reader. He’s stating a survival rule for anyone trying to hold attention without contempt. Onstage, the penalty for underestimating intelligence is immediate and public: laughter in the wrong place, restlessness, the chilly silence that tells you your “clever” trick just insulted them.

The specific intent is practical. Don’t over-explain. Don’t build plots out of coincidences and cardboard psychology. Don’t smuggle in your themes with the subtlety of a billboard. Maugham’s wording matters: “more of a fool than he is” implies the reader may be a bit of a fool already, or at least distractible, biased, tired. The sin is not acknowledging human limitation; it’s exploiting it lazily. He’s advising craft, not idealism.

The subtext is also moral. Taking your reader for a fool is a power move: the writer assumes a superior perch, feeding the audience pre-chewed meaning and expecting gratitude. Maugham flips that hierarchy. The reader has veto power. They notice the seams, the shortcuts, the smugness. They may not articulate it as “aesthetic failure,” but they feel it as disrespect.

Contextually, it fits a writer who navigated popular success and critical suspicion. Maugham knew that accessibility doesn’t require pandering; it requires precision. Treat the audience as capable, and you can still be ruthless about what you leave unsaid.