Oscar Wilde Quotes

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.

The 1890s was perhaps the most Gothic decade ever: 'Dracula,' 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' and 'The Time Machine,' not to mention 'Heart of Darkness' and 'The Interpretation of Dreams,' were all written between 1890 and 1899.

I used to hunt as a child but gave up the chase in my 'Ho Ho Ho Chi-Minh, we shall fight and we shall win' chanting and marching days - by which time I had come to share Oscar Wilde's feelings about 'the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.'

It's certainly true that I was brought up in that British amateur tradition, the one which always held that if you were reasonably good at cricket, knew one or two Latin texts and a few zingy Oscar Wilde quotes for dinner parties, you were pretty much ready to go and run some outpost in Hindustan.

I'm very proud of my New York debut. I played Oscar Wilde in 'Gross Indecency' off Broadway in about 1997. And I was very proud of my Broadway debut in 'The Iceman Cometh.'

"Art Imitates life," of course, is that phrase by Oscar Wilde. I called that song "Art Imitates Life" because Oh No was in the studio and he actually came up with that hook. When I was trying to figure out a name for the record, it just kind of made sense.

When you do these things, you sort of take the journey. The journey is all about how I can interweave the Oscar Wilde story, the story of Salome, the play itself and what it is, what it contains, and my journey as an actor, as a director, as a filmmaker, as a person struggling with whatever I'm struggling with - my own celebrity, my own life. This is semi-autobiographical in terms of my commitment to this kind of thing.

What a lurid life Oscar Wilde does lead - so full of extraordinary incidents. What a chance for the memoir writers of the next century

Actually, I do like pink clothes, but it's not because I'm girly, it's because I'm the reincarnation of 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.

If you put on an Oscar Wilde [play], it will interest those who are interested in Oscar Wilde. But it won't interest anybody else, because they won't get that wit.

I went to drama school. I'm classically trained; I studied Shakespeare, blah blah blah. But I always preferred to do Oscar Wilde, or Shakespeare's comedies over his dramas.

Oscar Wilde once said that to live is the rarest thing in the world, because most people just exist, and that's all. I don't know if he's right, but I do know that I spend a long time existing, and now, I intend to live.

Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

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.

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.

'The Judas Kiss' was really wonderful. I loved that it concentrated on just two events in Wilde's life, and Rupert Everett was top dollar.

I love David Suchet. I'm obsessed with Poirot. Then I saw him in 'The Importance of Being Earnest,' where he did Lady Bracknell, and he was amazing - he did it like a dinosaur, like a velociraptor.

[Vincent Price] did Oscar Wilde on Broadway, and I think he probably did it because he was almost like an Oscar Wilde. He had that brilliant humor.

The Chinese general Sun Tzu said that all war was based on deception. Oscar Wilde said the same thing of romance.

The Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility.

I have nothing to declare except my genius.

A refusal of nature as a model is a tradition that goes right back to Oscar Wilde.

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.

[Oscar Wilde's Salome screenplay] is not autobiographical in a sense where you go to my house and see my kids and stuff like that, but that's why I guess it's semi-autobiographical.