Henry James
I don't want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.Collection: Friendship
Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.Collection: Adjectives
She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.Collection: Thinking
Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.Collection: Infinite
The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.Collection: Men
The main object of the novel is to represent life. . .The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life - that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience.Collection: Art
We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.Collection: People
Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.Collection: Ironic
When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.Collection: Alive
Never say you know the last word about any human heart.Collection: Heart
if you are going to be pushed you had better jumpCollection: Ifs
There are women who are for all your 'times of life.' They're the most wonderful sort.Collection: Wonderful
To believe in a child is to believe in the Future.Collection: Children
It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life exept play gamesCollection: Winning
Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.Collection: Food
To take what there is in life 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.Collection: Inspirational
There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.Collection: Usual
One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.Collection: Judging
One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.Collection: Defense
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.Collection: Life
Things are always different from what they might be.Collection: Spiritual
The deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer...No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.Collection: Art
I have in my own fashion learned the lesson that life is effort, unremittingly repeated.Collection: Fashion
All intimacies are based on differences.Collection: Marriage
Make the short story tremendously succinct - with a very short pulse or rhythm - and the closest selection of detail - in other words summarise intensely and deeply and keep down the lateral development. It should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid formCollection: Pulse
Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!Collection: Inspirational
We must for dear life make our own counter-realities.Collection: Reality
I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.Collection: People
...he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.Collection: Laughter
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.Collection: Art
You are good for nothing unless you are clever.Collection: Clever
To live in the world of creation-to get into it and stay in it-to frequent it and haunt it...to think intently and fruitfully, to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation-this is the only thing.Collection: Inspirational
To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed.Collection: Children
He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.Collection: Sarcastic
God's creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.Collection: Men
Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.Collection: Delicate
The effect, if not the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption and our enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as possible, since that awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in turn wanders further and further for pasture. This action on the part of the mind practically amounts to a reaching out for the reasons of its interest, as only by its ascertaining them can the interest grow more various. This is the very education of our imaginative life.Collection: Office
A solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy ball, with the whole family gathered around to admire her before she goes.Collection: Daughter
To say that she had a book is to say that her solitude did not press upon her; for her love of knowledge had a fertilizing quality and her imagination was strong. There was at this time, however, a want of lightness in her situation, which the arrival of an unexpected visitor did much to dispel.Collection: Strong
I have lived too long in foreign partsCollection: Long
Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression.Collection: Expression
I've struck up a tremendous intimacy with Conte Alberto, and we literally can't live without each other. He is the first object my eyes greet in the morning, and the last at night.Collection: Morning
Novelist-Citizen of Two Countries Interpreter of his Generation on both Sides of the Sea.Collection: Country
Am I solemn? I had an idea I was grinning from ear to ear." "You look as if you were taking me to a prayer-meeting or a funeral. If that's a grin your ears are very near together." "Should you like me to dance a hornpipe on the deck?" "Pray do, and I'll carry round your hat. It'll pay the expenses of our journey.Collection: Prayer
To treat a big subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening's traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large.Collection: Fashion
Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.Collection: Thinking
Though it might have its momentary alarms, paternity is not an exciting vocation.Collection: Alarms
[Thomas Henry] Huxley is a very genial, comfortable being-yet with none of the noisy and windy geniality of some folks here, whom you find with their backs turned when you are responding to the remarks that they have made you.Collection: Science
The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant - no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.Collection: Responsibility