“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth”
Words by Oscar Wilde in his 1891 essay The Critic as Artist.
Stolen Words: A digital mask allows people to be authentic
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Tag Archives: quotes
Stolen Words – The Camouflage of Virtue
“The self-righteousness of that age was really camouflage to disguise its own hypocrisy, and the people who were loudest in their condemnation of my father were often those whose own lives could least bear investigation.”
– Vyvyan Holland writing in Son of Oscar Wilde. Published by Rupert Hart-Davis (1954)
And I can’t help thinking that the same still applies…
Stolen Words – Looking Away, Looking Back: The Ethics of Desire
“He slid forward in his chair, head thrown back, boots straight out across the hearthrug. Evert knew already how David took drink, and noted the way he mugged being drunker than he was. He saw for three seconds David was showing him a thing beyond speech, and looked away and back again in hot-faced excitement. Then David dropped his hand and covered himself loosely, as if Evert were indeed a pervert to peep at a man’s lap.”
Alan Hollinghurst – The Sparsholt Affair (2017)
Stolen Words – “It takes me years to finish a book.”
“I have no talent. It’s just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.”
– Novelist Graham Greene (1904-1991) speaking to American author Michael Mewshaw in 1972.
Stolen Words / We are living in the world of entitlement
Stolen Words/He had already read Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers
“Strangely, his name was Jean, which he pronounced as the French do, and although just turned 17, he had already read Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, and believed he was reincarnated from someone who died of an o.d. in 1979 at Studio 54. He knew way too much about that infamous club, and about infamy in general.”
The ‘bicycle thief’ of Manhattan’s West 14th Street Pier/
Fred H. Berger/Propaganda Magazine/Winter 1999
Stolen words/When one is beyond love, where does pleasure lie?
I see something written by somebody else, and like it. But I will forget the words, and they will be gone. I shall put them here. When I am old, and remember nothing, I will know that they didn’t get lost.
“When one is beyond love, where does pleasure lie? What does one do, seeing the lustful, disrespectful world going about its business, the young up one another’s arse? Was there ever an end to it, this irresistible, normal, subnormal craving for sex? Or did it go tauntingly on?”
Alan Hollinghurst/The Swimming Pool Library
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 