Explore Quotes by Henry James

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.

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.

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

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

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.

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

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

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

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.

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

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.

However British you may be, I am more British still.

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

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.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

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

A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.

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

The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.