Oscar Wilde Quotes About Literature

• The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

  Oscar Wilde

  Inspirational, Anger, Reading

  The Picture of Dorian Gray ch. 19 (1891)

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

  Oscar Wilde

  Writing, Media, Differences

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

  Oscar Wilde

  Book, Writing, Reading Literature

  The Picture of Dorian Gray preface (1891)

• 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

  Art, Passion, People

  Oscar Wilde (2013). “The Essential Oscar Wilde”, p.119, Simon and Schuster

• The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!

  Oscar Wilde

  Truth, Lying, Simple

  Oscar Wilde (2000). “The Plays of Oscar Wilde”, p.368, Wordsworth Editions

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

  Oscar Wilde

  Hate, Men, Use

  Oscar Wilde (2015). “The Picture of Dorian Gray (Diversion Classics)”, p.212, Diversion Books

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

  Oscar Wilde

  Purpose, Literature, Mould

• 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.

  Oscar Wilde

  Prayer, Government, Differences

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

  Oscar Wilde

  Writing, Ignorance, Three

  Intentions "The Critic as Artist" pt. 1 (1891)

• 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

  Writing, Views, Genius

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde”, p.1012, Wordsworth Editions

• Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.

  Oscar Wilde

  Lying, Literature, Imaginative

• 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.

  Oscar Wilde

  Believe, People, Rose

  Oscar Wilde (1999). “De Profundis: The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Writings”, p.159, Wordsworth Editions

• 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.

  Oscar Wilde

  Done, Literature, Singers

  Oscar Wilde (2014). “The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde”, p.93, Courier Corporation

• 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

  Country, Lying, Hero

  Oscar Wilde (1969). “The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde”, p.304, University of Chicago Press

• 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

  Drama, Play, Literature

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “Epigrams of Oscar Wilde”, p.70, Wordsworth Editions

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