(1854–1900)
Irish writer, playwright, and poet
Oscar Wilde
The originality which we ask from the artist is originality of treatment, not of subject. It is only the unimaginative who ever invent. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything.
Quoted in Oscar Wilde: The Critic as Humanist, by Bruce Bashford (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999), 116.
An echo is often more beautiful than the voice it repeats.
Sebastian Melmoth (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1905), 131.