To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however "good" I may become, remains unchanged.

From beginning to end Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fame had taken the plot out of his own hands.

Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at New styles of architecture, a change of heart.

It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, "What should I write at the age of sixty-four," but never, "What should I write in 1940."

Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.

The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow-poets. This means, in fact, he writes for his fellow-poets.

An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.