Oscar Wilde Journalism and Literature

I never travel without my diary.
One should always have something sensational
to read in the train.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
 

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
 

Its failings notwithstanding, there is much to be said in favour of journalism in that by giving us the opinion of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
 

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
 

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.
 

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
 

The good end happily, the bad unhappily - that is what fiction means
 

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
 

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
 

It is always the unreadable that occurs.
 

Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.
 

Biography lends to death a new terror.
 

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
 

Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.
 

This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
 

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.
 

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.
 

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.
 

Click below for more Oscar Wilde quotations

Intellect and Reason
Love and marriage
Art and Beauty
Life and Death
Man and Morality
Youth and Age
Men and Women
English and Americans

Class and Society
Work and Money
Journalism and Literature
Success and failure
Human failings
Foibles
Truth and Creativity