Top 100 Quotes About Henry James
#1. 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.
Philip Guedalla
#2. Henry James said there isn't any difference between "the English novel" and "the American novel" since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad.
Eudora Welty
#3. Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#4. The lawyer refused to tell me my brother's name, and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James - someone more talented than I: someone brilliant without even trying.
Mona Simpson
#5. I've never managed to get very far with Henry James.
Sarah Waters
#6. My interior is very, very dense - Proustian-looking, sort of Henry James. The walls are covered in pictures, and I transformed the big drawing room into a library lined with books.
Hamish Bowles
#7. Peter Kemp observed that 'Literature owes an enormous debt to Henry James's bowels.' As the correspondence revealed, the young Henry suffered from chronic constipation. To alleviate it his parents dispatched him on a grand tour of Europe (doubtless hoping the foreign food would loosen his entrails).
Anonymous
#8. If you look at my personal library, you will notice that it ranges from Henry James to Steig Larsson, from Margaret Atwood to Max Hastings. There's Jane Austen and Tom Perrotta and volumes of letters from Civil War privates. It's pretty eclectic.
Chris Bohjalian
#9. Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.
Vladimir Nabokov
#10. I don't think people believe that any more, I don't think people think that it really matters whether you appreciate Henry James more than Theodore Dreiser.
Louis Menand
#11. 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
Virginia Woolf
#12. A writer friend who was born in England summed up her feelings for the semicolon in a remark worthy of Henry James: "There is no pleasure so acute as that of a well-placed semicolon." I guess the opposite of that is that there is no displeasure so obtuse as that of an ill-placed semicolon.
Mary Norris
#13. Henry James joyously engaged in the act of writing. A good day's writing gave him a sense of strength, of control over chaos, a victory of order and clarity over the confused battle of existence.
Leon Edel
#14. It's not Jane Austen, it's not Henry James. But this writer, or writers, well, they're pretty damn good too.
Richard Curtis
#15. Expatriated Americans, even Henry James himself, have always seemed to me somewhat anchorless, rudderless, drifting before thewind.
Virginia Gildersleeve
#16. I thank Henry James for the scene in the hotel room, that I stole from Portrait Of A Lady This particular scene is the most beautiful scene ever written.
Leos Carax
#17. If Wells recognized any merit in [Henry] James, it was his undeniable talent for using very long sentences in order to say nothing at all. p. 516
Felix J. Palma
#18. There are plenty of writers, past and present, from Shakespeare to Henry James to Lydia Davis, who test the limits of coherence and put pressure on current notions of accessible (and acceptable) narrative methods. To thrive and change and grow, any art needs this kind of pressure.
Joanna Scott
#19. It always seemed to me that [Henry James] had a kind of rush of words to the head and never stopped to sort them out properly.
Christopher Morley
#20. The nearest we have to a Henry James or an Edith Wharton of the East Coast's Wasp upper classes.
Charlotte Curtis
#21. Some people might be surprised that 'Rambo's creator has a doctorate in American literature. One of my influences is Henry James, whose major theme is awareness. Whether I'm writing about military personnel, law enforcement, or De Quincey, the persistent theme is paying attention in a hostile world.
David Morrell
#22. Once you've put one of his [Henry James] books down, you simply can't pick it up again.
Mark Twain
#23. Gone are the days when you took Henry James on the train and read it in front of cute guys to impress them.
Amy Poehler
#24. I've been thinking that of late - she said. - Thinking what? - That the world of Henry James is becoming very small for me.
Donna Leon
#25. Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.
Willa Cather
#26. Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn't struck you.
Wallace Stegner
#27. Ironically, Henry James' biography comforts me & I long to make known to him his posthumous reputation he wrote, in pain, gave all his life (which is more than I could think of doing I have Ted, will have children but few friends) & the critics insulted & mocked him, readers didn't read him.
Sylvia Plath
#28. In many ways Churchill remained a nineteenth-century man, and by no means a common man. He fit the mold of what Henry James called in English Hours persons for whom the private machinery of ease has been made to work with extraordinary smoothness.
William Manchester
#29. Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.
H.L. Mencken
#30. Quote of the day: Quote of the day: 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.
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Henry James (1843 - 1916)
Henry James
#31. [Henry] James is much more complex than Jane Austen. That's why it's not so easy to adapt him. People expect a nice period piece, but that's not always the case. There's a deep human mystery in his work.
Agnieszka Holland
#32. I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.
David Antin
#34. 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.
Cynthia Ozick
#35. Are you New World or Old?'
'Sounds like a novel by Henry James.'
'Never read him.'
'Don't. But that was his question and he plumped for the Old.
Robertson Davies
#36. A trio of reputations lie at the heart of Henry James's 'The Portrait of a Lady.'
Tina Brown
#38. The privilege isn't given to everyone. ... You must have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge. In that way your eyes are opened to it. - Henry James, 1881
Hampton Sides
#39. I like to think that Henry James said his classic line, "A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost," while looking for his glasses, and that they were on top of his head.
Anne Lamott
#40. I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.
Peter Straub
#41. On a book by Henry James: Once you put it down, you simply can't pick it up.
Mark Twain
#42. 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.
Helen Vendler
#43. Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.
Ben Lerner
#44. Henry James's definition of the purpose of a novel: To help the human heart to know itself.
P.D. James
#45. It was a real treat when he'd read me Daisy Miller out loud. But we'd reached the point in our relationship when, in a straight choice between him and Henry James, I'd have taken Henry James any day even if Henry James were dead and not much of a one for the girls when living, either.
Angela Carter
#46. [Henry James] privately characterized Roosevelt as "a dangerous and ominous jingo," and "the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding Noise.
Edmund Morris
#47. His indirect way of approaching a character or an action, striving to realize it by surrounding rather than invading it, is ideally suited to the indefinite and suggestive presentation of a ghost story.
(introduction to "Sir Edmund Orme" by Henry James)
Herbert A. Wise
#48. [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.
H.G.Wells
#49. Artistic form is congruent with the dynamic forms of our direct sensuous, mental, and emotional life; works of art are projections of "felt life", as Henry James called it, into spatial, temporal, and poetic structures.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#50. I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.
James Thurber
#51. Henry James's later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it's transcribed into written prose.
Joyce Carol Oates
#52. I am reading Henry James ... and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.
Virginia Woolf
#53. 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.
George R R Martin
#54. I love long sentences. My big heroes of fiction writing are Henry James and Proust - people who recognise that life doesn't consist of declarative statements, but rather modifications, qualifications and feelings.
John Burnside
#55. The craftless anarchy of the Beat poets on the one hand, and the extreme control of Henry James on the other, suggest that for most human beings, just as both freedom and discipline are necessary in life, serendipity and design must coexist in a work to make it readable.
Mark Helprin
#56. The women in my life have all been librarians, English teachers, or booksellers. If they couldn't speak pidgin Tolstoy, articulate Henry James, or give me directions to Usher and Ox, it was no go. I have always longed for education, and pillow talk's the best.
Ray Bradbury
#57. Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
Oscar Wilde
#58. Henry James hated epilogues and refused to use them in his fiction. He said that life granted us no "epilogues", so why should art or literature?
Dan Simmons
#59. 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. HENRY JAMES T
Alexandra Stoddard
#60. I had the idea in my twenties that a writer could immediately become the late Henry James. Henry James himself had to mature. Even Saul Bellow did.
Cynthia Ozick
#61. 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.
Susan Hill
#62. 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.
Antonia Fraser
#63. I have just read a long novel by Henry James. Much of it made me think of the priest condemned for a long space to confess nuns.
W.B.Yeats
#64. Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?
Robert Adams
#65. For Henry James, class was 'the essentially hierarchial plan of English society' which was 'the great and ever-present fact to the mind of a stranger; there is hardly a detail of life that does not in some degree betray it'.
David Cannadine
#66. Henry James was our master of periphrasis
the fine art of saying as little as possible in the greatest number of words.
Edward Abbey
#67. Henry James rhymed Fellowship with the gesture of biting a neglected apple, and Ovid a scarlet curtain with the skin of Atalanta.
Hugh Kenner
#68. I didn't go to university; I hardly went to school, but I grew up among people well versed in Henry James and Proust, and just felt this endless, total inadequacy.
Emma Tennant
#69. If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.
Adam Haslett
#70. Henry James would probably roll over in his grave if he knew he was in any way responsible for this book.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#71. Henry James chews more than he bites off.
Henry Adams
#72. It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.
Henry James
#73. In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained.
James Henry Breasted
#74. But the blots, Turkey," intimated I. "True,-but, with submission, sir, behold these hairs! I am getting old. Surely, sir, a blot or two of a warm afternoon is not to be severely urged against gray hairs. Old age-even if it blot the page-is honorable. With submission, sir, we both are getting old.
Henry James
#75. I looked at the place with my heart beating as I had known it to do in the dentist's parlor.
Henry James
#77. Life is a predicament which precedes death.
Henry James
#78. The light of his plural pronoun was sufficiently reflected in his companion's face as he again met it; and he completed his demonstration.
Henry James
#79. Nothing exceeds the license occasionally taken by the imagination of very rigid people.
Henry James
#80. When once the gate is opened to self-torture, the whole army of fiends files in.
Henry James
#81. Her memory's your love. You want no other.
Henry James
#82. The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.
Henry James
#83. It is this conception of the unity of the human career which is perhaps the greatest achievement of historical study, since it gained a place analogous to that of natural science.
James Henry Breasted
#84. If you haven't had your life what have you had?
Henry James
#85. It doesn't matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life.
Henry James
#86. His absence from her for so many weeks had had such an effect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only the night before, as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of the Irish coast, he had felt all the force of his particular necessity. He
Henry James
#87. We see our lives from our own point of view; that is the privilege of the weakest and humblest of us;
Henry James
#88. It had come back to him simply that what he had been looking at all summer was a very rich and beautiful world, and that it had not all been made by sharp railroad men and stock-brokers.
Henry James
#89. I am 'sort of' haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.
Henry James
#90. Live all you can; it's a mistake not to.
Henry James
#91. I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies - in great towns and great crowds. It's a plant that takes time and space and air; and London society is a huge "squash", as we elegantly call it - an elbowing, pushing, perspiring, chattering mob.
Henry James
#93. 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.
Henry James
#94. You were to suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it.
Henry James
#95. There are women who are for all your 'times of life.' They're the most wonderful sort.
Henry James
#97. If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to TWO children - ?" "We
Henry James
#98. Make up to a good one and marry here, and your life will become much more interesting.
Henry James
#99. Ah, one doesn't give up one's country any more than one gives UP one's grandmother. They're both antecedent to choice - elements of one's composition that are not to be eliminated.
Henry James
#100. Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.
Henry James
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