'A poet can survive everything but a misprint.'
Quotes by Oscar Wilde
'A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.'
'The good ended happily, the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.'
'We live in an age that reads too much to be wise.'
'No publisher should ever express an opinion of the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide.'
'The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.'
'I have nothing to declare except my genius.'
on passing through the New York Customs House
'I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.'
'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 in.'
'In the old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by anybody.'
'There is no such thing as moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.