How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this portrait will remain always young.
I thought you dandies never got up till two, and were not visible till five.
I'm too fond of reading books to care to write them.
As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action.
Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about.
Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature.
People die of common sense.
It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.
That's an awful thing, a woman's memory.
There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
To have ruined one’s self over poetry is an honour.
I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.
Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.
Every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling.
I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.
I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.
She can talk brilliantly upon any subject provided she knows nothing about it.
Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
The one charm about the past is that it is the past.
This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go.
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.