Henry James Quotes

It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.

Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be . . .

It might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has done all that can reasonably be expected of it.

To believe in a child is to believe in the Future.

In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.

I had an excellent repast - the best repast possible - which consisted simply of boiled eggs and bread and butter. It was the quality of these simple ingredients that made the occasion memorable. The eggs were so good that I am ashamed to say how many of them I consumed ....It might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has done all that can be reasonably expected of it.

It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.

To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.

There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.

If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?

The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.

Don't pass it by - the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for.

When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.

Though it might have its momentary alarms, paternity is not an exciting vocation.

To live in the world of creation-to get into it and stay in it-to frequent it and haunt it...to think intently and fruitfully, to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation-this is the only thing.

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

You think too much.' 'I suppose I do; but I can’t help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches--a perfect circlet of pain! But I carry it as a queen carries her crown.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete

I don't care anything about reasons, but I know what I like.

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 will he adore you and the more all the latent beauty of his nature will come out.

Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

It is altogether an extraordinary growing, swarming, glittering, pushing, chattering, good-natured, cosmopolitan place, and perhaps in some ways the best imitation of Paris that can be found (with a great originality of its own).

I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.

The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.

I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.

Art requires, above all things, a suppression of self, a subordination of one's self to an idea.

It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life.

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.

Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone.

She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.

Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.

Women never dine alone. When they dine alone they don't dine.

Art does not lie in copying nature.- Nature furnishes the material by means of which is to express a beauty still unexpressed in nature.-The artist beholds in nature more than she herself is conscious of.

The "germ," wherever gathered, has ever been for me, "the germ of a story," and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint.

I've struck up a tremendous intimacy with Conte Alberto, and we literally can't live without each other. He is the first object my eyes greet in the morning, and the last at night.

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.

Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she should find herself in a difficult position, so that she might have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded.

What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.

Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out - you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.

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 ball, with the whole family gathered around to admire her before she goes.

if you are going to be pushed you had better jump