Quotes By Henry James

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

Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.

It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.

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

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.

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

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance... and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

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.

We work n 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.

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

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