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 JAMESI hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
More Henry James Quotes
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Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
HENRY JAMES -
I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.
HENRY JAMES -
I’m yours for ever–for ever and ever. Here I stand; I’m as firm as a rock. If you’ll only trust me, how little you’ll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.
HENRY JAMES -
Don’t pass it by – the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for.
HENRY JAMES -
Make the short story tremendously succinct – with a very short pulse or rhythm – and the closest selection of detail.
HENRY JAMES -
Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.
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 -
You must save what you can of your life; you musn’t lose it all simply because you’ve lost a part.
HENRY JAMES -
However British you may be, I am more British still.
HENRY JAMES -
…he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.
HENRY JAMES -
If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.
HENRY JAMES -
She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.
HENRY JAMES -
To establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one’s own.
HENRY JAMES -
To live in the world of creation-to get into it and stay in it-to frequent it and haunt it…to think intently and fruitfully, to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation-this is the only thing.
HENRY JAMES -
Money’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
HENRY JAMES