HENRY JAMES

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

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

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

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

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.

Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.

I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Deep experience is never peaceful.

Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?

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

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