Henry James

Vereker’s secret, my dear man — the general intention of his books: the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet.

The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.

The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy. Consistency was in itself distinction, and what was talent but the art of being completely whatever it was that one happened to be?

Print it as it stands — beautifully.

She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.

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.

However incumbent it may be on most of us to do our duty, there is, in spite of a thousand narrow dogmatisms, nothing in the world that anyone is under the least obligation to like — not even (one braces one's self to risk the declaration) …

The practice of "reviewing"… in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism.

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

To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived — to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that — this doubtless is the right way to live.

If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition …

A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.

There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: 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.

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

There are bad manners everywhere, but an aristocracy is bad manners organized.

My choice is the old world — my choice, my need, my life.

Cats and monkeys — monkeys and cats — all human life is there!

Deep experience is never peaceful.

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

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 …

Everything about Florence seems to be coloured with a mild violet, like diluted wine.

I haven't a creature to talk to...How in Boston, when the evening arrives, and I am tired of reading, and know it would be better to do something else, can I go to the theater? I have tried it, ad nauseam. Likewise calling. Upon whom?"

In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.