The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

"Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one,"

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies."

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize."