It's the birthday of the man considered by many to be the world's greatest wit: Oscar Wilde, (books by this born Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, in Dublin (1854). He's the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Salome (1891), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). He once said, "Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature."
He was a brilliant conversationalist. Anecdotes abound about his famous retorts. Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (books by this author) wrote in his memoir about how he once had dinner with Wilde: "His conversation left an indelible impression upon my mind. He towered above us all, and yet had the art of seeming to be interested in all that we could say. He had delicacy of feeling and tact. ... He took as well as gave, but what he gave was unique. He had a curious precision of statement, a delicate flavour of humour and a trick of small gestures to illustrate his meaning, which were peculiar to himself."
There are entire books devoted to Oscar Wilde's one-liners.
It was Wilde who said,
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it."
And he said, "Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others."
And also, "To be premature is to be perfect."
His most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest, opened in London on Valentine's Day 1895; he was 40 years old. A few months later, he was convicted of "acts of gross indecency," meaning that he had a male lover. He was sentenced to two years hard labor. When he got out of prison he moved to Paris, where his health deteriorated and he died at the age of 46 in a seedy hotel, at which he was registered under the name Sebastian Melmoth. Poet W.H. Auden later wrote: "From the beginning Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fate had taken the plot out of his hands."
Oscar Wilde said, "Life is never fair. ... And perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not."
Data originally posted over on the Writer's Almanac
Image borrowed from Yahoo.
2 comments:
I find it interesting that you don't credit Garrison Keillor when your posts are taken directly from The Writer's Almanac.
In some ways these literary truths'
are self-evident, but your point is
well taken. I credit most everything
and link to it, and will do so even
for lifted, borrowed facts that some
staffer than works for Keillor lifted,
borrowed, or picked up somewhere
else on the internet.
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