Quotes About Oscar Wilde

The stipulation for a contestant on The X Factor is an uncontrollable vibrato and a great deal of cancer in the family. The show will drag its sugary slug trail of sentimentality from now until the traditional Christmas single of an overproduced 1980s ballad doused with a lachrymose orchestra. Not so much a wall of sound as a shroud of sound, dedicated to some carcinogenically defunct auntie. As Oscar Wilde so perceptively put it, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh out loud.

For some peculiar reason, two films about Oscar Wilde were started at the same time, back in 1959 or 1960. I played Wilde in one, and Robert Morley was in the other. As it turned out, at that particular moment there was no market for any Oscar Wilde movie at all.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

I've always hated business breakfasts; I believe Oscar Wilde had a point when he said that only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.

In "The Decay of Lying" Oscar Wilde asserts that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

On Oscar Wilde:] If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it. [ Life Magazine, June 2, 1927]

There is no such thing as a heterosexual male, only men who haven't met Oscar Wilde yet.

And alien tears will fill for him pity's long broken urn. For his mourners will all be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn.

I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.

Her former suitor having been none other then Oscar Wilde, Florence had effectively captured the imaginations of the creators of Svengali, Dracula, and Dorian Gray. ... Rarely, if ever, has a woman been the focus of quite so much literary demonism.

Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man.

I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man.

As one reads history ... one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted.

I have a bit of a love affair with fairy tales and some of the ideas of Irish mythology, like Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, who captured a lot of that very beautifully.

I was raised on the brothers Grimm, but my favorite fairy tales in the world are Oscar Wilde's - 'The Nightingale and the Rose,' 'The Selfish Giant.' The latter is probably my all-time favorite.

He said, You know what Oscar Wilde said—women are meant to be loved, not understood. Applies to both of them, darling. And I nodded, although it seemed to me that I was going to be a woman too and I would like it if someone thought they should understand me.

Likewise, Oscar Wilde asked an English journalist to look over 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' before publication: "Will you also look after my 'wills' and 'shalls' in proof. I am Celtic in my use of these words, not English." Wilde's novel upset virtually every code of late Victorian respectability, but he had to get his modal auxiliaries just right.

To cite a quote attributed to Oscar Wilde, "Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike." It's Us versus Them framed morally, and the importance of what Greene calls "the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality" is shown by the fact that most intergroup conflicts on our planet ultimately are cultural disagreements about whose "right" is righter.

A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.

Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.

Laying in bed this morning contemplating how amazing it would be if somehow Oscar Wilde and Mae West could twitter from the grave.

In the words of Oscar Wilde, 'I can resist everything but temptation.

London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don't know.

Oscar Wilde defined the cynic as the one who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.