Great writing

Just when I think I might be a pretty decent writer, I read this:

"The artist, painter, poet, or musician, by his decoration, sublime or beautiful, satisfies the aesthic sense; but that is akin to the sexual instinct, and shares its barbarity: he lays before you the greater gift of himself.  To pursue his secret has something of the fascination of a detective story.  It is a riddle which shares with the universe the merit of having no answer."

Penned by W. Somerset Maugham, it is found on page one of 'The Moon and Sixpence', written in 1933.  Who writes like that?  I just popped an anthology of his novels open to a random page and there was that perfect passage.  Here's another: 

"I was in a rut.  I was exasperated by the quiet and orderly life I had been living.  I had had enough of the week-end visits to the houses of the rich and the grand and interminable dinner-parties in Mayfair to which I was bidden.....I determined to cut myself adrift from the agreeable friends and the monotonous pleasures that were wasting me."  (Personally, the editor in me would have eliminated the words "that were", but I am nit-picking.)

The above is his description of the mood he was in when he decided to write that novel.  I ask again, who writes like that? 

From 'The Razor's Edge':  "For ten years after this I saw neither Isabel nor Larry.  I continued to see Elliott, and indeed, for a reason that I shall tell later, more frequently than before, and from time to time I learnt from him what was happening to Isabel.  But of Larry he could tell me nothing."

The perfection of the punctuation permits the second sentence to run that long.; few people have any clue today about the importance of punctuation. 

Maugham, born in 1874 in Paris, was reared by an uncle in an austere household.  I didn't know he worked as a secret agent in the British Intelligence Service during WWI.  "His output was enormous and he died in 1965, having watched with wry detachment the gradual collapse of his literary and moral critics to whom, in any case, he had always been indifferent."  So says the dust jacket. 

He is one of my favourite writers; the other is American Edith Wharton.  I took an on-line short story course a few years ago and we were asked to share our favourite writers.  Almost everyone raved about Stephen King.  Please.  He cannot hold a candle.