Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wildewas an Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. He is remembered for his epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays, as well as the circumstances of his imprisonment and early death...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth16 October 1854
CityDublin, Ireland
CountryIreland
Formerly we used to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.
The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.
You should study the Peerage, Gerald. It is the one book a young man about town should know thoroughly, and it is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.
With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?
Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . .
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.
In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.
The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.
What you read when you don't have to...
Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.