Oscar Wilde Writing Quotations

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate--not to the artist but to the public.... Without them we would judge a man simply by his work; but at present the newspapers are trying hard to induce the public to judge a sculptor, for instance, never by his statues but by the way he treats his wife; a painter by the amount of his income and a poet by the colour of his necktie.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever.

I don’t write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you.

Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it.

He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize

Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . .

If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.

Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical.

They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist.

It is personalities not principles that move the age.

Books are never finished, They are merely abandoned.

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.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices, there are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.

My writing has gone to bits - like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain.

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed.

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.

I have put my talent into writing, my genius I have saved for living.

That is the mission of art - to make us pause and look at a thing a second time.

George Moore wrote brilliant English until he discovered grammar.

I wrote when I did not know life; now that I do know the meaning of life, I have no more to write. Life cannot be written; life can only be lived.

The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.

I write because it gives me the greatest possible artistic pleasure to write. If my work pleases the few I am gratified. As for the mob, I have no desire to be a popular novelist. It is far too easy.

He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigraph on his tombstone.

She lives the poetry she cannot write.

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.

A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.