Oscar Wilde Quotes About Writing
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A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
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The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
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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.
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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.
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My writing has gone to bits - like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain.
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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.
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That is the mission of art - to make us pause and look at a thing a second time.
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If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
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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.
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The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
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She lives the poetry she cannot write.
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Who am I to tamper with a masterpiece?
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George Moore wrote brilliant English until he discovered grammar.
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In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever.
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Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
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I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.
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All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
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Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
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Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.
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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.
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Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
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He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigraph on his tombstone.
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I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
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The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.
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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.
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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.
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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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His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.
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I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.
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Books are never finished, They are merely abandoned.
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