Henry James

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

Deep experience is never peaceful.

There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.

Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.

An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.

The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.

I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth - I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.

It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.

I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.

The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?

One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.

People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.

I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.