1874–1965 · English novelist, playwright and short-story writer
W. Somerset Maugham (25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) was an English novelist, playwright and short-story writer whose lucid, unsentimental prose made him one of the most widely read authors of his era — Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, Cakes and Ale, The Razor’s Edge. He read La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims as a teenager in Heidelberg, and his biographer argued that the echo ran through his work for sixty years, which is exactly why a maxim-shaped remark sounded plausible in his mouth. Even so, the 1959 remark reached print second-hand through a newspaper columnist, and Maugham’s own biographer cautioned against treating a columnist’s report as authentic — so the line is credited to him, not documented from him.