You are good for nothing unless you are clever.
HENRY JAMESTo myself – today – I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.
More Henry James Quotes
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…he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.
HENRY JAMES -
However British you may be, I am more British still.
HENRY JAMES -
The main object of the novel is to represent life. . .
HENRY JAMES -
The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.
HENRY JAMES -
To believe in a child is to believe in the Future.
HENRY JAMES -
I don’t want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.
HENRY JAMES -
Don’t pass it by – the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for.
HENRY JAMES -
And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.
HENRY JAMES -
What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
HENRY JAMES -
Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.
HENRY JAMES -
Money’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
HENRY JAMES -
Make the short story tremendously succinct – with a very short pulse or rhythm – and the closest selection of detail.
HENRY JAMES -
In other words summarise intensely and deeply and keep down the lateral development. It should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form
HENRY JAMES -
Deep experience is never peaceful.
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 -
When you forget to eat, you know you’re alive.
HENRY JAMES -
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.
HENRY JAMES -
Excellence does not require perfection.
HENRY JAMES -
Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
HENRY JAMES -
Until you try, you don’t know what you can’t do.
HENRY JAMES -
She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.
HENRY JAMES -
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
HENRY JAMES -
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 JAMES -
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 -
Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
HENRY JAMES -
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
HENRY JAMES