Explore Quotes by Henry James

Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.

To believe in a child is to believe in the Future.

The artist beholds in nature more than she herself Nature is conscious of.

All intimacies are based on differences.

To treat a big subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening's traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large.

If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.

We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donn´e: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.

His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.

The "germ," wherever gathered, has ever been for me, "the germ of a story," and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint.

It is indeed immensely picturesque. I can fancy sitting all a summer's day watching its shadows shorten and lengthen again, and drawing a delicious contrast between the world's duration and the feeble span of individual experience. There is something in Stonehenge almost reassuring; and if you are disposed to feel that life is rather a superficial matter, and that we soon get to the bottom of things, the immemorial gray pillars may serve to remind you of the enormous background of time.

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

We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.

Of course what he most intensely dreams of is being taken out on walks, and the more you are able to indulge him the more will he adore you and the more all the latent beauty of his nature will come out.

I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.

The deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer...No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.

Make him [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.

Writing is not primarily escape, but use.

What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?

I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.

We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.

One of my latest sensations was going to Lady Airlie's to hear Browning read his own poems - with the comport of finding that, at least, if you don't understand them, he himself apparently understands them even less. He read them as if he hated them and would like to bite them to pieces.