Henry James Quotes

It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life exept play games

Don't pass it by - the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for.

Things are always different from what they might be.

When primitive law has once been embodied in a Code, there is an end to what may be called its spontaneous development.

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.

Writing is not primarily escape, but use.

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

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

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.

One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

I recall my fleeting instants in Savannah as the taste of a cup charged to the brim.

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

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

Ideas are, in truth, force.

Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.

I don't want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.

It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.

I always want to know the things one shouldn't do." "So as to do them?" asked her aunt. "So as to choose." said Isabel

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

New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.

Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

The movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract.

I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live.

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have.

The epoch of Customary Law, and of its custody by a privileged order, is a very remarkable one.

He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.

To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text.

Love has nothing to do with good reasons.

Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.

It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life.

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

The fatal futility of Fact.

In art economy is always beauty.

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

He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.

I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.

Life's too short for chess.

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.

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

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.

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

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

London is on the whole the most possible form of life.

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

...he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.

Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.