Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Originality, Maugham suggests, doesn’t arrive like inspiration; it arrives like a disruption. The line is engineered to puncture the sentimental myth that audiences reward the new on sight. Instead, he frames “the world in general” as a creature of routine, soothed by “comfortable habits of thought” the way theatergoers are soothed by familiar plots and familiar morals. The verb choice is the tell: originality “startles.” Not persuades, not invites, but jolts. It’s a physiological metaphor that makes taste feel less like refined judgment and more like reflex.

The subtext is both defensive and clinical. Maugham isn’t just describing public hostility; he’s explaining it as the predictable first stage of encountering work that doesn’t fit existing categories. Anger becomes a kind of cognitive self-protection: when the mind can’t quickly file something under “romance,” “satire,” “proper drama,” it reaches for the blunt instrument of rejection. That also flatters the artist’s position without sounding self-pitying. If the crowd is angry, maybe you’ve touched a nerve - or at least refused to hand them the old comforts.

Context matters: Maugham wrote and staged work in a period when British theater was negotiating realism, modernism, and shifting social codes, while mass culture was expanding and standardizing taste. A playwright lives at the mercy of immediate audience reaction, and Maugham’s insight has the ring of someone who’s watched “new” ideas die in the stalls before they ever reach the critics. The kicker is “first reaction”: he leaves room for time to do what shock can’t - turn estrangement into appetite.