Quotes About Author

We have quite the same ideas. No; I think our ideas are quite different. But he has been most pleasant.

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

Thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name of common sense.

I don't think I am heartless. Do you?' 'You have done too many foolish things during the last fortnight to be entitled to give yourself that name, Dorian,' answered Lord Henry with his sweet melancholy smile.

You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.

It is simply expression, as Henry says, that gives reality to things.

That's an awful thing,a womans memory

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away

I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.

The only horrible thing in the world is ennui, Dorian. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.

I have no ambition to play the part of a mother, and why should I interfere with her illusions? I find it hard enough to keep my own.

Love is a more wonderful thing than art.' 'They are both simply forms of imitation,' remarked Lord Henry.

He did not wring his hands, as do Those witless men who dare To try to rear the changeling Hope In the cave of black Despair.

He atones for being occasionally somewhat overdressed by being always absolutely over-educated. He is a very modern type.

strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us.  Men can be analysed, women . . . merely adored.

My Salome is a mystic the sister of Salammbô a Saint Thérèse who worships the moon.

Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.

I think after Christmas would be better for publication: I am hardly a Christmas present.

Through vanity he had spared her.

The only real people are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies. The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are what they are, but that the author is what he is. Otherwise the novel is not a work of art.

Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about

Are all men bad? Oh, all of them, my dear, all of them, without any exception. And they never grow any better. Men become old, but they never become good.

In matters of great importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing.