9 Henry James Quotes on Literature

Henry James quotes on literature

3. The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination... To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

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

9. Whatever question there may be of his [Thoreau's] talent, there can be none, I think, of his genius. It was a slim and crooked one; but it was eminently personal. He was imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial - he was parochial; it is only at his best that he is readable.

21. 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.

28. However incumbent it may be on most of us to do our duty, there is, in spite of a thousand narrow dogmatisms, nothing in the world that anyone is under the least obligation to like - not even (one braces one's self to risk the declaration) a particular kind of writing.

43. The full, the monstrous demonstration that Tennyson was not Tennysonian.

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

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

59. I caught him, yes, I held him - it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.