“There is no such thing, wrote Oscar Wilde, as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. Presumably, then, Mein Kampf would have been all right had it been better written.”

Trash, Violence, and Versace: But Is It Art? http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_1_urbanities-trash.html (Winter 1998).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "There is no such thing, wrote Oscar Wilde, as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. Pre…" by Theodore Dalrymple?
Theodore Dalrymple photo
Theodore Dalrymple 96
English doctor and writer 1949

Related quotes

Oscar Wilde photo

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

Variant: There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Tommaso Campanella photo
Novalis photo

“Many counterrevolutionary books have been written in favor of the Revolution. But Burke has written a revolutionary book against the Revolution.”

Fragment No. 104; on Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
Blüthenstaub (1798)

“Oscar Williams’s new book is pleasanter and a little quieter than his old, which gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

precedes by twelve years Truman Capote’s putdown of Jack Kerouac: “That isn’t writing at all, it’s typing.”; “from Verse Chronicle”, p. 137
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Thomas Carlyle photo
Francis Bacon photo

“I regard my life as rather a failure in the only thing in which I wanted it to succeed. I have not written the books I ought to have written and I have written a lot of books I should not have written.”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

Response to a would be biographer in 1980, as quoted in "When Stephen met Sylvia" in The Guardian (24 April 2004) http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1201328,00.html
Context: I am very honoured by your wanting to write a life of me. But the fact is I regard my life as rather a failure in the only thing in which I wanted it to succeed. I have not written the books I ought to have written and I have written a lot of books I should not have written. My life as lived by me has been interesting to me but to write truthfully about it would probably cause much pain to people close to me — and I always feel that the feelings of the living are more important than the monuments of the dead.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo
Eudora Welty photo
George Steiner photo

“What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 6 (p. 36).

Related topics