Quotes & Sayings About Literature Oscar Wilde

I take many things seriously. Rudyard Kipling, Harper Lee, Oscar Wilde, and Elmore Leonard are all held in the highest regard. I am dead serious when I discuss the many reasons that Ernest Hemingway's greatest contribution to literature was his generous decision to take his own life. I will not be sucked into a discussion of politics by people who prefer emotion to reason. The designated hitter is an abomination, and the day pitchers and catchers report is the start of the new year despite what those ill-informed calendar makers might try to tell you." "I — Brian D. Meeks

Mother made sure her little kids were subjected to a strict routine. We were given a timetable which covered our every waking moment, copies of which were posted by our bedside, in the sitting room and in the kitchen. Story hour meant that mother would read us novels and short stories by Guy de Maupassant, Oscar Wilde and Edmondo de Amicis. Soon we graduated to Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev. She read them to us in Chinese and I never realised until much later that the writers wrote them in different European languages. Comics were absolutely forbidden and so were Enid Blyton adventures and pop music ... Lee Cyn and I soon went to a primary school nearby ... After mother's rigorous timetable, school became fun and easy-going. — Ang Swee Chai

My one quarrel is with words. That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in literature. — Oscar Wilde

Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose. — Oscar Wilde

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it. — Oscar Wilde

Journalism is unreadable, and literature is unread. — Oscar Wilde

He was conscious - and the thought brought a gleam of pleasure into his brown agate eyes - that it was through certain words of his, musical words said with musical utterance, that Dorian Gray's soul had turned to this white girl and bowed in worship before her. To a large extent the lad was his own creation. He had made him premature. That was something. Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect. But now and then a complex personality took the place and assumed the office of art, was indeed, in its way, a real work of art, life having its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting. — Oscar Wilde

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. — Oscar Wilde

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. — Oscar Wilde

The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend upon it for their daily bread, and the highest form of literature, poetry, brings no wealth to the singer. For producing your best work also you will require some leisure and freedom from sordid care. — Oscar Wilde

Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature. — Oscar Wilde

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

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful — Oscar Wilde

What you read when you don't have to ... — Oscar Wilde

Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying. — Oscar Wilde

The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature. — Oscar Wilde

In literature mere egotism is delightful. — Oscar Wilde

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

Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect. — Oscar Wilde

If they know nothing of death, it is because they know little of life, for the secrets of life and death belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and who possess not merely the present but the future, and can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame. Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be truly realised by Literature alone. It is Literature that shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest. — Oscar Wilde

Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one's own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. — Oscar Wilde

I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use the paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of Oscar Wilde, I want to do the wide sultry heavens of Conrad, the rolled-gold sundowns and crazy-quilt skies of Hitchens and Kipling as well as the pastel dawns and twilights of Chesterton. All that is by way of example. As a matter of fact I am a professed literary thief, hot after the best methods of every writer in my generation. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The only link between Literature and the Drama left to us in England at the present moment is the bill of the play. — Oscar Wilde

Algernon. The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility! Jack. That wouldn't be at all a bad thing. Algernon. Literary criticism is not your forte, my dear fellow. Don't try it. You should leave that to people who haven't been at a University. They do it so well in the daily papers. — Oscar Wilde

'The Lady's World' should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women's opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure. — Oscar Wilde

I foresee,' said Goethe, 'the dawn of a new literature which all people may claim as their own, for all have contributed to its foundation.' If, then, this is so, and if the materials for a civilisation as great as that of Europe lie all around you, what profit, you will ask me, will all this study of our poets and painters be to you? I might answer that the intellect can be engaged without direct didactic object on an artistic and historical problem; that the demand of the intellect is merely to feel itself alive; that nothing which has ever interested men or women can cease to be a fit subject for culture. — Oscar Wilde

For the various spiritual forms of the imagination have a natural affinity with certain sensuous forms of art - and to discern the qualities of each art, to intensify as well its limitations as its powers of expression, is one of the aims that culture sets before us. It is not an increased moral sense, an increased moral supervision that your literature needs. Indeed, one should never talk of a moral or an immoral poem - poems are either well written or badly written, that is all. And, indeed, any element of morals or implied reference to a standard of good or evil in art is often a sign of a certain incompleteness of vision, often a note of discord in the harmony of an imaginative creation; for all good work aims at a purely artistic effect. 'We must be careful,' said Goethe, 'not to be always looking for culture merely in what is obviously moral. Everything that is great promotes civilisation as soon as we are aware of it. — Oscar Wilde

To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture. — Oscar Wilde

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable. — Oscar Wilde