“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.”

Never say you know the last word about any human heart.

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.

Roxy Sorkin, your father just won the Academy Award. I’m going to have to insist on some respect from your guinea pig.

When I feel that something I’m writing is going well, everything in my life is good and the things in my life that aren’t good are completely manageable. If it’s not going well, Miss America could be standing there in a swimsuit handing me a nobel price and I wouldn’t be happy about it

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistance.

Do not insist me to let you go, you come half hearted like a crescent moon, and you go heart-filled like a full moon which glows.

Some stories wait their turn to be told, others just tap you on the shoulder and insist you tell them.

I insist that people – wherever they live – have their rights and they must be able to fight for them.

How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.