Henry James Quotes

200 quotes in 2169 categories

• Novelist-Citizen of Two Countries Interpreter of his Generation on both Sides of the Sea.
• The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one…
• A solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy…
• He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.
• The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
• The fatal futility of Fact.
• Women never dine alone. When they dine alone they don't dine.
• Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!
• In art economy is always beauty.
• That accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap, and the easy.
• One of my latest sensations was going to Lady Airlie's to hear Browning read his own poems - with the comport of finding that, at…
• We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.
• I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up…
• Make him [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.
• What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?
• Writing is not primarily escape, but use.
• The deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer...No good novel will ever proceed from…
• I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.
• Of course what he most intensely dreams of is being taken out on walks, and the more you are able to indulge him the more…
• We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.

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