What a lurid life Oscar Wilde does lead - so full of extraordinary incidents. What a chance for the memoir writers of the next century

People who insist on telling their dreams are among the terrors of the breakfast table.

Some people are born to lift heavy weights, some are born to juggle golden balls.

To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.

When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.

No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.

The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.

Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs.

I need no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul.

Undergraduates owe their happiness chiefly to the consciousness that they are no longer at school. The nonsense which was knocked out of them at school is all put gently back at Oxford or Cambridge.

It's called entrepreneurSHIP, not entrepreneurSIT. Don't wait. Just ship.

She held herself until the sobs of the child inside subsided entirely. I love you, she told herself. It will all be okay.

This is a jolly imprudent adventure!

I think insomnia is a sign that a person is interesting.

He had entered the rough world of men, where a man's acts follow him wherever he goes in the form of story.

A film is its own thing and in an ideal world I think a film should be discovered knowing nothing and nothing should be added to it and nothing should be subtracted from it.

The best feedback is what we don't want to hear.

The only reason is that I hadn't seen The Modern Jazz Quartet perform live and a live performance is often where the real experience of jazz takes place. I'm not familiar with the Boswell Sisters.

In documentary, which is the only thing I'm really very familiar with, women are very easily relegated into a producer role.

Such are thou and I: but what I am thou canst not be; what thou art any one of the multitude may be.