“We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.

If you have work to do, don’t wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.

The superiority of one man’s opinion over another’s is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.

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.

An Englishman’s never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue.

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

She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.

If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.

Things are always different from what they might be.

The main object of the novel is to represent life. . .

We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have.

Sorrow comes in great waves…but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us.

And remember this, that if you’ve been hated, you’ve also been loved.

Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.

Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.

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.

There will always be those who must look into the dark in order to see.

In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared.

[H]istory is seen in a rear-view mirror while the future is the dark, foggy road ahead, filled with unknown trouble.

Curiosity takes ignorance seriously – and is confident enough to admit when it’s in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.

I’m so shy now I wear sunglasses everywhere I go.

Iwas a sculptor.Butthat’sreallydrawinga drawing you fall over in the dark, a three-dimensional drawing.

The dark of my eyes, the fullness of my lips, and coal in my complexion.

With my hand in his, I looked at all the apartment buildings with rushes of love, peering in the wide streetside windows that revealed living rooms painted in dark burgandies and matte reds.