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Sudden success can overwhelm a budding talent. But to Maugham, it only brought the exhilarating privilege of doing exactly as he pleased, which was to master his craft: "The books I wrote during the first ten years were the exercises by which I sought to learn my business. Writing is a wholetime job. No professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it." He worked stubbornly at refining and paring down his style, inflicting on himself tedious hours of discipline. The result was a style so spare, so clear of the extraneous adjective or the decorative phrase that it almost escapes notice. But no major writer has been more ruth lessly candid, or more humble, about his own abilities. Despite the pains he had taken, he once confessed: "The fact remains that the four greatest novelists the world has ever known—Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoi and Dostoevski—wrote their respective languages very badly. It proves that if you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write."
As for his own literary rank, Maugham himself had no doubts about where he belonged—"in the very front row of the second-raters." That is not as modest a ranking as it might seem. Maugham himself put Stendhal, Voltaire and A. E. Housman there. "I think that one or two of my comedies will be remembered for a time and a few of my best short stories will find their way into anthologies," he told a visitor in 1944. "This is not much, I'll admit, but it is better than nothing."