"Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him
into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for
life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense.
The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful
are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make,
and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of
all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.
The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look.
The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets
makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that
he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare
not realize."

"I wonder is that really so, Harry?" said Dorian Gray,
putting some perfume on his handkerchief out of a large,
gold-topped bottle that stood on the table. "It must be,
if you say it. And now I am off. Imogen is waiting for me.
Don't forget about to-morrow. Good-bye."

As he left the room, Lord Henry's heavy eyelids drooped, and he began
to think. Certainly few people had ever interested him so much
as Dorian Gray, and yet the lad's mad adoration of some one else
caused him not the slightest pang of annoyance or jealousy.
He was pleased by it. It made him a more interesting study.
He had been always enthralled by the methods of natural science,
but the ordinary subject-matter of that science had seemed to him
trivial and of no import. And so he had begun by vivisecting himself,
as he had ended by vivisecting others. Human life--that appeared