The gods had given me almost everything. I had
genius, a distinguished name, high social position,
brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a
philosophy and philosophy an art: I altered the minds
of men and the colours of things; there was nothing
I said or did that did not make people wonder...
drama, novel, poem in rhyme, poem in prose, subtle
or fantastic dialogue, whatever I touched I made
beautiful in a new mode of beauty; to truth itself I
gave what is false no less than what is true as its
rightful province, and showed that the false and true
are merely forms of intellectual existence. I treated
Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mode of
fiction; I awoke the imagination of my century so
that it created myth and legend around me: I
summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence
in an epigram.

Oscar Wilde on himself in a letter to Ada Leverson