The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?

A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.

Some drink to forget, I drink to remember. I drink in order to understand what I mean and to discover what I know. Under its benign influence all the stories and dramas which properly belong to the sphere of art are announced by me in conversation.

absinthe removes the bitter taste of failure and grants me strange visions which are charming principally because they cannot be written down. Only in absinthe do I become entirely free and, when I drink it, I understand the symbolic mysteries of odour and of colour.

One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.

But just as my philosophy had ceased to interest me as soon as it was formulated into a set of principles so, when I saw myself being imitated, I realised at once what an incubus my aesthetic personality might become if I were to be trapped within it. Imitation changes, not the impersonator, but the impersonated.

I can recall quite clearly the journey from Omaha to San Francisco which I made with the opera troupe; God had created the world in less time than it took us to travel across America.

the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirror on every page

the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirrored on every page