Make the short story tremendously succinct – with a very short pulse or rhythm – and the closest selection of detail.
HENRY JAMESBe generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.
More Henry James Quotes
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An Englishman’s never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue.
HENRY JAMES -
What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
HENRY JAMES -
I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.
HENRY JAMES -
I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I’m very glad therefore you’ve been a part of it.
HENRY JAMES -
I call people rich when they’re able to meet the requirements of their imagination.
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 -
We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.
HENRY JAMES -
He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.
HENRY JAMES -
Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.
HENRY JAMES -
I don’t want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.
HENRY JAMES -
Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.
HENRY JAMES -
Imbeciles 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 JAMES -
All intimacies are based on differences.
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We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art…what we are talking about and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered.
HENRY JAMES -
There’s no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.
HENRY JAMES