The hero, the wonderful young Parisian in whom the romantic and the scientific temperaments were so strangely blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And, indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it.
– Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 11. Dorian is impressed by the hero of the yellow book, a decadent young Parisian man, and uses the novel as an instruction manual for his own life.