Oscar Wilde Quotes About Literature
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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.
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The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
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Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.
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The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!
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The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread and the highest form of literature, Poetry, brings no wealth to the singer.
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The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
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Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
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Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.
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I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.
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The only link between Literature and the Drama left to us in England at the present moment is the bill of the play.
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The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, there are 1.322 words in the Declaration of Independence, but government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26.911 words. The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
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Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
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The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.
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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.
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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.
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