Enlightened Realism?

     How ugly most people are! It's a pity they don't try to make up for it by being agreeable.
— W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook, 1892, p. 7.

     How the gods must have chuckled when they added Hope to the evils with which they filled Pandora's box, for they knew very well that this was the cruellest evil of them all, since it is Hope that lures mankind to endure its misery to the end.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Ibid, 1892, p. 7.

     The spirituality of man is most apparent when he is eating a hearty dinner.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Ibid, 1897, p. 36.

     They say that life is short; to those who look back it may seem short enough; but to those who look forward, it is horribly long, endless. Sometimes one feels one cannot endure it. Why cannot one fall asleep and never, never again wake? How happy must be the lives of those who can look forward to eternity! The thought of living for ever is horrible.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Ibid, 1900, p. 53.

     End of a life. It is like reading a book at close of day; one reads on, not seeing that the light is failing, and then suddenly as one pauses for a moment, one finds the light has gone; it is quite dark and looking down again at the book one cannot see, and the page is meaningless.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Ibid, 1901, p. 54.

     She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer made her confident way toward the white cliffs of the obvious.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Ibid, 1919, p. 174.

     I was surprised when a friend of mine told me he was going over a story he had just finished to put more subtlety into it; I didn't think it my business to suggest that you couldn't be subtle by taking thought. Subtlety is a quality of the mind, and if you have it you show it because you can't help it. It's like originality: no one can be original by trying. The original artist  is only being himself; he puts things in what seems to him a perfectly normal and obvious way: because it's freah and new to you you say he's original. He doesn't know what you mean. How stupid are those second-rate painters, for instance, who can't but put paint on their canvas in a dull and commonplace way and think to impress the world with their originality by placing meaningless and incongruous objects against an academic background.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Ibid, 1933, p. 303.

     [Maugham's penseé escalier to the question: "What does it feel like to be famous?]
     "It's like having a string of pearls given you. It's nice, but after a while, if you think of it at all, it's only to wonder if they're real or cultured."
— W. Somerset Maugham, Ibid, 1941, p. 312.