Others

Do you want to know the great drama of my life? It’s that I have put my genius into my life; all I’ve put into my works is my talent.

You should study the Peerage, Gerald … It is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.

It is better to be beautiful than to be good.

The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

It is through Art, and through Art only, that we can realise our perfection; through Art, and through Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them.

It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.

There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

I always say, keep a diary and some day it’ll keep you.

I design plain truth for plain people.

News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead.