Quotes & Sayings About Books Oscar Wilde

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. — Oscar Wilde

Everyone complains that we can no longer intake huge chunks of text. I find that a reason to celebrate. It's something that has deep roots in modernism, stretching from the Futurists' use of typography to Pound's use of ideograms to concrete poetry. — Kenneth Goldsmith

Children have a natural antipathy to books- handicraft should be the basis of education. Boys and girls should be taught to use their hands to make something, and they would be less apt to destroy and be mischievous. — Oscar Wilde

You talk books away," he said; "why don't you write one?" "I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal. — Oscar Wilde

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them. — Oscar Wilde

Not that kind of cheating," Mags said. "More like ... skipping ahead. If you like someone, you should have to make an effort. You should have to get to know the person
you should have to work for that first kiss. — Rainbow Rowell

It is better to paint from memory, for thus your work will be your own ... — Paul Gauguin

Belize is so raw and so clear and so in-your-face. There's an opportunity to see something about human nature that you can't really see in a politer society, because the purpose of society is to mask ourselves from each other. — John McAfee

I have a weird graphic I made for myself once, and it's the "lineage tree" of everyone that has inspired me and more importantly given me the permission to be myself in my work. There's a slew of people from theater: Erwin Piscator, Chekhov, Mac Wellman, Stein; and then a whole lot of wonderful works that are called novels: everything from Tristram Shandy to Bouvard and Pecuchet, to Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, and Finnegan's Wake and Invisible Man, and then contemporary writers I'm currently reading like Renee Gladman and Anakana Schofield. There are many more in my graphic also: there's Beckett's novels and Melancholy of Resistance, and there's Reznikoff and Dos Passos, there are contemporary poets I admire like Jena Osman, dance-writers like Michelle Ellsworth, and books I can't help read for fun like Muriel Spark. But there's Groucho Marx and Oscar Wilde. It's a huge question and the answers would likely change daily. But these I'm talking about here are in the pantheon. — Thalia Field

Office hours are from 12 to 1 with an hour off for lunch. — George S. Kaufman

Dawn and its excesses always reminded me of heaven, a place where I have always known I would not be comfortable. — Marilynne Robinson

I cannot choose one hundred best books because I have only written five — Oscar Wilde

I believe I am to have enough to live on for about eighteen months at any
rate, so that if I may not write beautiful books, I may at least read beautiful
books; and what joy can be greater? — Oscar Wilde

I'm content to stand on tradition. I'm even more content to wipe my feet on it. — Aaron Allston

Late 20th century music was a really important thing. It changed the world, and I'm part of that, and now I'm part of the museum that celebrates that. — Daryl Hall

I'm not crazy about being out of control, and I get emotional when things are unclean. When things are out of order. When things are messy. Because I lived in a mess as a child. — Bryan Cranston

Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable — Oscar Wilde

Are we to deny our daughters the works of Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck or Shakespeare?....Where is the equality in banning girls from enjoying wonderful works of literature?....What kind of society defines suitable reading material by sex? This is indefensible censorship encouraging ignorance and bias. [About Caitlin Moran's statement.] — Diane Davies

They peer in and at the same moment both angle back their heads, as if they have taken a position a little too close to a panoramic screen. They are tall and big-boned and look like men playing women's parts in a play by Oscar Wilde. 'Nan, Verge's sisters are here,' my mother says loudly. But Nan already knows, and furiously pokers the fire to try and smoke them back out. Nan here is The Aged P only with more mischievousness than Mr Wemmick's in Great Expectations, the only book of which my father kept two copies (Books 180 and 400, Penguin Classic & Everyman Classics editions, London), both of which I have read twice, deciding each time that Great Expectations is the Greatest. If you don't agree, stop here, go back and read it again. I'll wait. Or be dead. — Niall Williams

We are not as impervious as we think we are. - Dr Maura Isles — Tess Gerritsen

Books are never finished, They are merely abandoned. — Oscar Wilde

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. — Oscar Wilde

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. — Oscar Wilde

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it. — Oscar Wilde

Maybe my songs are my partner. How 'bout that? Yeah, the biggest relationship I have is with my songs. — Diane Warren

as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. The nineteenth century — Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde always makes me smile - with respect and admiration. His short stories prove that it is possible to be both sarcastic, even cynical, but deeply compassionate. Just seeing the cover of one of Wilde's books in a bookshop makes me smile. — Orhan Pamuk

The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing; this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It's perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite; with books my life would be livable
any life. — Oscar Wilde

Evangelicals believe they are saved by grace through faith but then add a man-made waiver that you have to work as hard as you can can meet middle-class behavioral patterns to hang onto it. — Steve Stockman

With slouch and swing around the ring
We trod the Fools' Parade!
We did not care: we knew we were
The Devils' Own Brigade:
And shaven head and feet of lead
Make a merry masquerade. — Oscar Wilde

When Wilde composed his works he surrounded himself with books. A friend remembered him writing a poem 'with a botanical work in front of him from which he . . . [selected] the names of flowers most pleasing to the ear to plant in his garden of verse'.5 Aubrey Beardsley's caricature of Wilde, 'Oscar Wilde at Work', shows the author at his desk surrounded by mountains of books. — Thomas Wright

You must feel what you're singing, not just have a good presentation of the language. — Cecilia Bartoli

He seems to read nothing but my books, and says his one desire is to 'follow in my footsteps'! But I have told him that they lead to terrible places. — Oscar Wilde

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

The nineteenth century is a turning point in history, simply on account of the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of Nature, the other the critic of the books of God. Not to recognise this is to miss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progress of the world. — Oscar Wilde

With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy? — Oscar Wilde

He's clearly a man with a mission, but it's not one of vengeance. Bruce is not after personal revenge ... He's much bigger than that; he's much more noble than that. He wants the world to be a better place, where a young Bruce Wayne would not be a victim ... In a way, he's out to make himself unnecessary. Batman is a hero who wishes he didn't have to exist. — Frank Miller

What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.
American novels, answered Lord Henry. — Oscar Wilde