“Wilde's permanent celebrity belongs to literature, and only his transient notoriety to police news.”

“My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.”

“When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.”

“Literature is too full of 'acknowledgments' and squabbles about originality...”

“In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.”

“It is the tame elephants who enjoy capturing the wild ones.”

“I find it easy to forgive the man who invented a devilish instrument like dynamite, but how can one ever forgive the diabolical mind that invented the Nobel Prize in Literature?”