Oscar Wilde Quotes

Quotes by and about Oscar Wilde

(Continued from his main entry on the site.)

Robert Ross: "[Oscar Wilde] was never quite sure himself where and when he was serious."

Ernest Hemingway: "Wilde was said by people who knew him to have been a better talker than a writer."

New York Times: "He was regarded as a brilliant conversationalist."

New York Times: "[He possessed] wit, [a] pleasing literary facility, and ... droll views of life."

New York Times: "Had he possessed the necessary perseverance and steadfastness of character, Wilde could have been one of the great poets of the nineteenth century."

J.T. Grein: "Oscar Wilde did not dive very deeply below the surface of human nature, but found, to a certain extent rightly, that there is more on the surface of life than is seen by the eyes of most people."

Aldous Huxley: "Another type of pronounced extravert, whose outlook on life I find impossible to understand except theoretically, is the type of man who lives for sensations rather than for ideas or emotions... Oscar Wilde's is a typical extravert-sensationalist's philosophy. I understand what he writes, but I can discover no personal reason in myself for accepting his major premises. When I read a book by Wilde, I feel the most intimate personal reasons for rejecting them."