Biographies Quote by Sylvia Plath

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

— Oscar Wilde

When he died, Emerson was thought of as the representative American writer par excellence, and his point of view was still so potent that…

— Howard Mumford Jones

I had the idea in my twenties that a writer could immediately become the late Henry James. Henry James himself had to mature. Even…

— Cynthia Ozick

“Through a story that delineates the power of words to obfuscate, exploit, and distort human reality, Henry James offers his own nuanced, precise, and…

— Siri Hustvedt

“No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, "Good food at…

— Lynne Truss

Henry James's later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of…

— Joyce Carol Oates

Every writer's got to pay some attention, I suppose, to what his critics say because theirs is a reflection of what the audience feels…

— Edward Albee

“A bug lies in quiet repose; when he passed no one knows. Did he suffer, was he pained? Before he died, was knowledge gained?…

— Nikhil Sharda

There is something really horrific for any human being who feels he is being consumed by other people. I'm talking about a writer's critics,…

— Wole Soyinka

“Johnson argued that the most truthful life-writing is when ‘the writer tells his own story’, since only he knows the whole truth about himself.…

— Hermione Lee

“He made writing look easy and critics hate that. They like evidence of a struggle, of creative agony, wringing the masterpiece out of one’s…

— Jessica Zafra

“He was always being told that writers never become famous or rich, but of course that was not why he wrote, he wrote simply…

— Andrew James Pritchard