The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life – that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience.
HENRY JAMESWe care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.
More Henry James Quotes
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Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.
HENRY JAMES -
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.
HENRY JAMES -
Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
HENRY JAMES -
When you forget to eat, you know you’re alive.
HENRY JAMES -
Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.
HENRY JAMES -
A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
HENRY JAMES -
Deep experience is never peaceful.
HENRY JAMES -
If I should certainly say to a novice, ‘Write from experience and experience only,’ I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.’
HENRY JAMES -
Money’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
HENRY JAMES -
I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.
HENRY JAMES -
I take up my own pen again – the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles.
HENRY JAMES -
She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!
HENRY JAMES -
There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.
HENRY JAMES -
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.
HENRY JAMES -
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.
HENRY JAMES