The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.
—Henry James
Topics: America
I think I don’t regret a single ‘excess’ of my responsive youth – I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn’t embrace.
—Henry James
Topics: Carpe-diem
One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.
—Henry James
Topics: Civilization
I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.
—Henry James
Topics: Simplicity
The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
—Henry James
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction
The fatal futility of Fact.
—Henry James
Topics: Facts
In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.
—Henry James
Topics: Museums
Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way.
—Henry James
Topics: Tact
Deep experience is never peaceful.
—Henry James
Topics: Experience
Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
—Henry James
Topics: Tourism, Travel
True happiness, we are told, consists getting out of one’s self, but the point is not only to get out; you must stay and to stay out, you must have some absorbing errand.
—Henry James
Topics: Happiness
What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
—Henry James
Topics: Character
The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
—Henry James
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
—Henry James
Topics: Arts, Art, Artists
Art does not lie in copying nature.—Nature furnishes the material by means of which to express a beauty still unexpressed in nature.—The artist beholds in nature more than she herseif is conscious of.
—Henry James
Topics: Art
The terrible fluidity of self-revelation.
—Henry James
Topics: Identity
If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.
—Henry James
Topics: Exile
Don’t mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
—Henry James
Topics: Judges, Judgment, Mind, Judging
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
—Henry James
Topics: Reading, Books
I think patriotism is like charity—it begins at home.
—Henry James
Topics: Patriotism
Which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit?
—Henry James
Topics: Thoughts
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
—Henry James
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers
He had dropped upon a seat halfway down the nave and, again in the museum mood, was trying with head thrown back and eyes aloft, to reconstitute a past, to reduce it in fact to the convenient terms of Victor Hugo, whom, a few days before, giving the rein for once in a way to the joy of life, he had purchased in seventy bound volumes, a miracle of cheapness, parted with, he was assured by the shopman, at the price of the red-and-gold alone. He looked, doubtless, while he played his eternal nippers over Gothic glooms, sufficiently rapt in reverence; but what his thought had finally bumped against was the question of where, among packed accumulations, so multiform a wedge would be able to enter..
—Henry James
Topics: Reading
An Englishman is never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue.
—Henry James
Topics: Britain
Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
—Henry James
Topics: Animals
For myself I live, live intensely and am fed by life, and my value, whatever it be, is in my own kind of expression of that.
—Henry James
Topics: Writing
Greville Fane’s French and Italian were droll; the imitative faculty had been denied her, and she had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities. She knew it, but she didn’t care; correctness was the virtue in the world that, like her heroes and heroines, she valued least.
—Henry James
Topics: Mistakes
The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.
—Henry James
Topics: Experience
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
—Henry James
Topics: Tradition
No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class—no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life.
—Henry James
Topics: America
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- T. S. Eliot American-born British Poet
- Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor American-born British Politician
- Dorothy L. Sayers English Novelist, Playwright
- Phyllis Bottome British Novelist
- Graham Greene British Novelist
- Louis Leo Snyder American-born German Scholar
- Israel Zangwill English Writer, Political Activist
- Dodie Smith British Novelist
- Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
- Arnold Bennett British Novelist
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