Life is far too important to be taken seriously.

God knows; I won't be an Oxford don anyhow. I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious. Or perhaps I'll lead the life of pleasure for a time and then—who knows?—rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is the highest end that man can attain here below? To sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too. Reply to his friend and contemporary David Hunter-Blair who asked him what his real ambition was, in about 1878.

I am dying as I have lived: beyond my means. Wilde is supposed to have said this on his deathbed, while drinking a glass of champagne.

I hope you're not leading a double life, pretending to be wicked while being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

The people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failure.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.