To establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one’s own.
HENRY JAMESTo establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one’s own.
HENRY JAMESIf 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 JAMESImbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.
HENRY JAMESExcellence does not require perfection.
HENRY JAMESI think patriotism is like charity — it begins at home.
HENRY JAMESIdeas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
HENRY JAMESTo believe in a child is to believe in the Future.
HENRY JAMESIn art economy is always beauty.
HENRY JAMESEvery good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.
HENRY JAMESIt takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
HENRY JAMESDon’t pass it by – the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for.
HENRY JAMESIt’s never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.
HENRY JAMESJudge everyone and everything for yourself.
HENRY JAMESThe right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.
HENRY JAMESSorrow comes in great waves…but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us.
HENRY JAMESThe 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