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 JAMESThere 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.
More Henry James Quotes
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Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.
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I don’t want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.
HENRY JAMES -
Don’t try so much to form your character – it’s like trying to pull open a tight, tender young rose.
HENRY JAMES -
The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.
HENRY JAMES -
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.
HENRY JAMES -
It led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and served to deepen the feeling of failure.
HENRY JAMES -
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
HENRY JAMES -
She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.
HENRY JAMES -
One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.
HENRY JAMES -
She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.
HENRY JAMES -
One can’t judge till one’s forty; before that we’re too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.
HENRY JAMES -
The superiority of one man’s opinion over another’s is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
HENRY JAMES -
Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.
HENRY JAMES -
Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
HENRY JAMES -
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
HENRY JAMES