I am re-reading Henry James as a change from history. I began with Daisy Miller, and I've just finished Washington Square. What a brilliant, painful book.
The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James I, James II, and the Old Pretender.
Once you've put one of his [Henry James] books down, you simply can't pick it up again.
Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.
The distinction between literary and genre fiction is stupid and pernicious. It dates back to a feud between Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James. James won, and it split literature into two streams. But it's a totally false dichotomy.
That is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand this?
I've never managed to get very far with Henry James.
I can think of no other writer who so thoroughly embodies the Jamesian spirit as Alison Lurie. Like him she can excavate all the possibilities of a theme. Like his, her books seem long, unbroken threads, seamless progressions of effects.
Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that
There was a period... when I used to say, with as much ferocity as I could muster, 'I hate Henry James, and I wish he was dead.' Influence is perdition.
Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.
I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.
A trio of reputations lie at the heart of Henry James's 'The Portrait of a Lady.'
I have only read very classic traditional English ghost stories, other than Henry James, who wrote some magnificent short ones as well as the longer 'Turn of the Screw.' He, Dickens, and M.R. James are my influences.
Henry James was our master of periphrasis -- the fine art of saying as little as possible in the greatest number of words.
Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
And it's impossible for me to read Henry James.
I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.
Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.
The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.
[A novel by Henry James] is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently place, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string.
I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together.
The nearest we have to a Henry James or an Edith Wharton of the East Coast's Wasp upper classes.
I was in Venice teaching, so I reread Henry James's "The Wings of the Dove." I love James.
I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.
